Specimen weight: 2,450 grams. This is my favorite slice off the the mass which I bought with a partner. This piece measures 295 mm by 300 mm by 4 mm. Polished and etched one side only. This beautiful iron was found in Zaragoza Spain, in the 1950's. The Zaragoza meteorite is an iron, Fine octahedrite (IVA-anom). It weighed 162 kilograms and was found on the surface. I bought the meteorite at the Munich mineral show in 2006 in Munich Germany, shipped it home, where it sat for months, then cut it up.
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Close-up photo of the large triolite nodule in this slice. In the entire meteorite there were only two or three large triolite nodules, most slices had none, or a few very small inclusions. |
 Close-up of the extremely-fine Zaragoza meteorite etch pattern. You can see it is a fine octahedrite pattern, but it is very faint, very hard to see unless close-up. It seems to be altered or faded by heating in space. |
This photo shows the bottom of the Zaragoza meteorite before cutting. You can clearly see that this part was under the ground with the soil-level clearly showing that about 50% of the meteorite was protruding above the surface.
Once the meteorite was in the saw, I had to move it to the exact position to make the first cut. This took all day to get it right and rigged in the saw to where it could not move.
A view of the meteorite once the first face was cut off, we then took off another large slice, 50 kilograms, which allowed us to work on more manageable pieces. Each cut took more than 16 hours, and used several blades worth ~$300 each! This meteorite was a pain in the proverbial rear to cut up.
Video of the cutting. Amazingly this end was the only piece that cut rapidly, after that, the cutting turned into a never-ending saga that dragged on for weeks.
