[meteorite-list] Meteorite Parent Planet(s)

[Walter Branch]

Hello Everyone,   Reading John Wasson's Disturbing the Solar System made me realize how often I have seen the phrase "the ___'s parent body (where ___ is whatever classification of meteorite one chooses).  Wasson and others talk about asteroid parent bodies as if there was only one parent body for the mesosiderites, one for carbonaceous chondrites, one for the pallasites, etc.    I guess I always assumed that particles accreted early on such that any meteorite type formed in a number of planetesimals and what eventually came to be known as ___'s formed in many parent bodies.   I realize the meteorite specimens which fall to Earth are but chips from larger bodies which have undergone fragmentation due to collisions among these bodies, but I guess I had always assumed that there were any number of planetesimals from which the various types of meteorites originated.   What is the current thinking on this? Was there a single ___ parent body? Could x number of planetesimals have occupied y distances from the sun and thus been have exposed to different degrees of thermal alteration by solar radiation (ignoring radioactivity as a heat source)? Do all ___'s have one common ancestor?   -Walter ------------------------------------------ www.branchmeteorites.com