Professor Goodrich was awarded a 3-year research grant in the amount of $120,000 by the NASA Cosmochemistry program.  The award is to study the petrology and geochemistry of a group of meteorites called Ureilites.  Meteorites are rocks that come from other planets (or small planetary bodies) in our Solar System and were fortuitously ejected to land on Earth, where they are collected and studied by scientists as rare and important samples.  Most meteorites come from the asteroids, and represent the most primitive rocky materials in our Solar System – material left over from its formation 4.5 billion years ago.  A small percentage of these come from asteroids that experienced the beginning of planetary differentiation (heating, melting, and consequent chemical and physical fractionation), and thus record the earliest stages of geological evolution of the larger planets such as the Earth.  The Ureilites represent one such asteroid.  Professor Goodrich's work is aimed at deciphering the thermal evolution and differentiation history of the ureilite parent body, by studying clues in the rocks themselves.  She will utilize modern petrologic and geochemical techniques such as Scanning Electron Microscopy and Electron Microprobe Analysis to determine the mineralogy and chemical compositions of the rocks, and will then perform petrologic modelling to ascertain the temperature and pressure conditions of their formation.  She will also use Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry to obtain radioisotopic age dates for the rocks, in order to determine their exact time of formation relative to other primitive meteorites.  Results of this work will  contribute to an understanding of early geologic processes (~4.5 billion years ago) in our Solar System.