Howardite
A stony meteorite made of broken pieces of eucrite and diogenite rock, glued together on the surface of the asteroid Vesta.
A howardite is a breccia, a rock made of broken fragments cemented together. Its fragments come from two other meteorite types: eucrites, which are volcanic lavas, and diogenites, which are pyroxene-rich rocks from deeper inside an asteroid. Mixing like this happens when impacts churn up a surface for millions of years, so howardites are pieces of the rubbly ground of their parent world.
That world is very probably Vesta, the second-largest body in the asteroid belt. Howardites are a sample of the very soil NASA's Dawn spacecraft photographed from orbit, and many contain gases from the solar wind, which can only have soaked into grains lying exposed at the surface. The name honours Edward Howard, a British chemist who studied meteorites around 1800. A well-known example is Kapoeta, which fell in what is now South Sudan in 1942.
To recognise one, look at a cut face: you should see angular light and dark pieces of different sizes, some pale grey, some greenish-yellow, sitting in a fine grey groundmass. Fresh stones have a black, sometimes glossy crust. Always ask an adult before handling specimens.
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Level: Explorer Ages 10 and up