Vesta and the howardites
This website is named after a kind of meteorite. Here is where they come from.
Vesta is one of the biggest asteroids in the asteroid belt. It is about 525 kilometres across, shaped like a slightly squashed ball, and made of rock with a metal core.
Long ago, a giant crash blasted a huge crater near Vesta's south pole. Lots of rock was thrown into space. Some pieces have reached Earth as meteorites.
There are three main kinds of meteorites from Vesta. Some are made of lava from its surface. Some are made of rock from deeper down. And some, called howardites, are made of broken bits of both, pressed together.
Howardites are named after Edward Howard, a chemist. In 1802 he helped to show that stones which fell from the sky were different from Earth rocks.
Between 2011 and 2012, a spacecraft called Dawn went into orbit around Vesta. It took photographs and measurements. They matched what scientists had learned from the meteorites.
Vesta is the brightest asteroid in our sky. On rare dark nights, at its brightest, it can just be seen without a telescope.