Enormous Lunar Melt Meteorite - 7525 grams
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Writeup from the Meteoritical Bulletin Database
Northwest Africa 16282 (NWA 16282)
Classification: Lunar meteorite (melt breccia)
Physical characteristics: Single roughly spheroidal stone. Exterior is very dark in color with irregular to smooth, sandblasted, vesiculated fusion crust. Approximately half of the mass is coated with caliche owing to partial burial in the desert. Freshly chipped surface reveals the interior of this meteorite to be a breccia with scattered fragments of light-colored clasts set in a dark-gray to black cryptocrystalline matrix.
Petrography: (C. Agee, UNM) Electron microprobe analysis and reflected light microscopy of a polished mount show this meteorite to be an anorthositic gabbronorite melt breccia consisting primarily of fine-grained pigeonite with lesser amounts of augite and olivine all of which are scattered and poikilitically enclosed in a dominant plagioclase-rich vesicular melt rock host. Minor amounts of ilmenite, troilite, Fe-metal (low Ni), and Ti-chromite, Al-spinel, and Cr-Ti spinel were detected.
Geochemistry: (A. Ross, UNM) Olivine Fa31.6±7.6, Fe/Mn=95±8, n=12; pigeonite Fs21.6±0.5Wo6.0±3.4, Fe/Mn=60±9, n=9; augite Fs14.0±3.3Wo40.5±0.9, Fe/Mn=47±4, n=3; plagioclase An95.8±1.0, n=6.
Classification: Lunar (anorthositic gabbronorite melt breccia), nomenclature based on Stoeffler et al. (1980).
Photograph courtesy of Dr. Carl Agee
