Martian Meteorite News Archive 2008

July 20, 2008: Several new martian meteorites from Northwest Africa have been named and approved by the NomCom of the Meteoritical Society, more recently - most of them being paired with older finds. However, two of them are new, and worth mentioning:

Northwest Africa 4797 - w-SHE - TKW 15g

The first, NWA 4797, represents a new type of martian rock that hadn't been sampled, thus far. Initial studies show it to be a highly shocked wehrlite (peridotite) cumulate related to enriched basaltic (not "lherzolitic") shergottites. An abstract has been published by Irving et al at the 39th LPSC in March 2008, entitled Unique Ultramafic Shergottite Northwest Africa 4797.

Northwest Africa 5029 - b-SHE - TKW 14.67g

The second, NWA 5029, is a fascinating coarse-grained shergottite that had been purchased by Bruno & Carine Fectay as early as 2003, but that hadn't been officially classified until more recently. The small oriented stone seemed too precious to cut, but to cut it proved to be one of the best ideas ever. NWA 5029 is definitely not paired to the coarse-grained NWA 480/1460 as you can see in the picture to the left.

April 04, 2008: Martin Altmann, and Stefan Ralew of Chladni's Heirs just announced a new Mars rock:

Northwest Africa 4925 - o-SHE - TKW 282.3g

It is a nice olivine-phyric shergottite, probably paired to the much smaller NWA 4527 which we announced in our martian news for September 2007. Like its sister NWA 4527, the new NWA 4925 displays a porphyritic texture with large chemically zoned olivine megacrysts set into a fine-grained groundmass composed of pyroxene and maskelynite. >> older archive entries >>