Advances in determining asteroid chemistries and mineralogies

Considerable progress has been made in the last few years in determining asteroid chemistries and mineralogies. Dedicated spacecraft missions have allowed mineralogical predictions based on ground-based data to be confirmed or refuted. These missions include NEAR-Shoemaker to (253) Mathilde and (433) Eros, Hayabusa to (25143) Itokawa, and Dawn to (4) Vesta and (1) Ceres, the upcoming Hayabusa2 to (162173) Ryugu, and the upcoming OSIRIS-Rex to (101955) Bennu. All of these missions have or will make significant advances that could not have been made through just Earth-based observations. The recovery of Almahata Sitta from 2008 TC3 was a rare opportunity to recover meteorite samples from a spectrally observed body from a naturally occurring event. This review will discuss the importance of spacecraft missions to asteroids.