Asteroids provide unique insights into the origin and early
history of the solar system. Since asteroids are considered to
be fairly pristine, studying them provides opportunities to
learn more about the primordial solar system, its materials,
processes and history. Since the discovery in 1801 of the first
asteroid, Ceres, during the era when everyone was searching for
the "missing planet", astronomers have been trying to understand
what they are, where they came from, why they exist and what
they can tell us about how our solar system formed and evolved.
Within the asteroid population are a number of sub-populations,
the primary division is due to the locations of the asteroids.
There are the Main Belt Asteroid (MBA) population that resides
between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter (1.8–3.5 AU) and the
Near-Earth Asteroid (NEA) population whose orbits have an
aphelion ≤ 1.3 AU. Within both the MBA and NEA populations are
further subdivisions (taxonomic classes) based on physical
properties of the asteroids such