There are three basic types of meteorites: stones, irons, and stony-irons. Where do they come from? Most come from the asteroid belt, an orbital zone around the Sun between Jupiter and Mars with millions of rock fragments. The fragments (called meteoroids when in space) never assembled into a planet in that particular orbit as did other planets in our solar system. These fragments in the asteroid belt have varying orbits from circular to elliptical (elongated circles), and some end up ricocheting off each other sending them into new orbital paths that rockets them through our atmosphere (a shooting star or even a meteor shower), landing on Earth where they are then called meteorites.

Most fragments (meteoroids) come from the asteroid belt, although a few are known to come from Mars and the Moon by way of asteroidal collisions with enough energy to dislodge rocks

from those planets. These pieces manage to escape the planet's gravity from the tremendous impact and make their way to us via their new trajectories. Therefore, the chemistry makeup of these particular meteoroids is different from an asteroid's chemistry, since they originate from a planet and not the asteroid belt.

The main asteroid belt exists as a full circle and the Kuiper Belt sits in the outer reaches of our Solar System (the two distinct patches in the picture), and may have brought much of the water that formed Earth's oceans from volatiles such as ice.