Meteorites: An Overview

Meteorites come from numerous parent bodies with a wide variety of geological histories. A few (~0.5%) come from Mars or the Moon; the rest are impact debris from collisions between asteroids orbiting between Mars and Jupiter. Unlike terrestrial, Martian, and lunar rocks, the asteroidal meteorites contain minerals that formed before the Sun and the Solar System, during the growth of planetesimals and planets from the disk of dust and gas around the Sun (“the solar nebula”), and during the first half-billion years of Solar System evolution.