Reprinted with permission of UNSW Press from 'Meteorites; A Journey Trough Space and Time' by Alex Bevan and John de Laeter.

About the diagram: Towards the left you can see where chondrules were thought to have condensed and aggregated from the Solar Systems initial gas and dust cloud. During this time silicate material (stony) and iron material also separated. These aggregates cooled and formed larger Chondrite bodies. Later these were disrupted through impacts with each other and they remelted to form bodies from which Iron meteorites and Achondrites are thought to originate. Throughout all of these various processes, pieces manage to find their way to Earth for us to find as meteorites.