"We feel strongly that this is what came before the planets, " said Carol Raymond, Dawn's deputy principal investigator at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

WSJ: Asteroid Vesta Gets a Close Study

Dr Amy Mainzer, principal investigator on the Neowise (Near-Earth Wise observations) project at the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) in California, said that "estimating the ages and origins of the asteroids should help us to correlate events on Earth and impact craters on the Moon with what is going on in the Solar System".

BBC: Asteroid thought to kill dinosaurs may not be guilty