NWA 5492

This meteorite was found in Algeria in 2008, and was a single mass weighing 587 grams. I bought this meteorite in Tucson in Jan 2009. We sent it to Germany to be precision cut in alcohol on a wire-saw. After cutting we had less than 450 grams left and had to donate more samples for study on top of the 20 gram minimum. It seems a lot of scientists are working on it and they exhausted the initial donation sample.

This meteorite is an enigma, it is under intense scientific study and debate. It is a Bencubbinite (CB) however, it is different than all other known CB meteorites except one from Antarctica. There is debate that it could represent a new class, but more likely it will be approved as an anomalous CB type Bencubbinite meteorite.

I was planning to wait until classification was complete, but that may take many more months, and I invested so much money into it that I do not want to wait any longer on full classification. We all know how long interesting meteorites take to complete!

This is a close-up photo taken of a slice. You can clearly see that it is a matrix of NOTHING but chondrules and metal! So actually the matrix is metal. It is very similar to the Gujba meteorite, with less and smaller metal though, and far fewer metallic chondrules.

This meteorite will be amazing in thin section, but I will let someone else make them.

The slices are all 1mm thick! With this kind of thin cutting, we suffered a great amount of cut-loss on this meteorite.