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59.7 gram slice.   H7-melt breccia

TKW 6.6 kg. Observed fall 28 January 2021, Lampung, Indonesia.



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Steve writes:

The Punggur meteorite fell on January 28th, 2021, at 9:53 PM local time, becoming the first witnessed fall of the year. It fell onto the central Lampung area of Sumatra Island, including Astomulyo Village in Indonesia’s Punggur district (hence the name of the meteorite). Residents as far away as North and West Lampung reported hearing a thunderous crash from the sky and seeing a bolide traveling from west to northwest, leaving a dust cloud that persisted for several tens of minutes. The bolide’s detonations were recorded by the Indonesian InaTEWS Tsumami Early Warning System’s southwestern UTSI, KASI, and PSSM sensors (the timing of each sensor’s detection provided the meteor’s northeastern trajectory). Later, five stones ranging from 32 grams to 2.2 kg and totaling 6,559 grams were found spread across an almost 3.5 mile range.

The 32 gram stone bounced off of a roof. A 138 gram stone crashed through another roof and landed on a child’s bed, purportedly tearing a hole in the bedsheet (but fortunately, unlike the Sylacauga meteorite, the bed was uninhabited at the time). A 2.5 kg stone was found in a rice paddy, with a 1.7 kg stone found almost completely submerged in a deep hole in another (the finder of the latter and his wife are Muslims who had always wanted to go on a pilgrimage to Mecca – the subsequent sale of their stone made that journey possible).

But the most interesting story is of the 2.2 kg stone that fell onto the roof of an Astomulyo Village house owned by 60-year-old Mujilah and her 68-year-old husband Muhtajam. Just before the fall, they heard rumbling noises and three loud reports, which Mujilah initially thought was an exploding car tire. A bang followed at the backside of their house, and going outside to investigate, they found a 25 cm long meteorite that had bounced off their roof and partially buried itself next to the kitchen’s outer wall.

The meteorite had fallen on an important date for the local religion, as well as just after Muhtajam had prayed for help with his long fight with kidney disease. Because of the timing, local religious leaders thought it was a supernatural sign and advised Muhtajam to submerge the stone in aquarium water and share the cocktail with friends and family with the expectation that drinking this “cosmic tea” would bring them luck and good health. In the days that followed, he generously put samples in plastic bags and gave them to anyone who wanted to benefit from the purported magical healing powers of the meteoritical concoction.

This gifting continued for several days until a team of atmospheric and planetary sciences researchers from ITERA (Sumatra’s Institute of Technology) visited the site and declared the rocks to be meteorites, thus denying their supernatural powers. They then cut an approximate 400 gram piece off of one end of the stone, which exposed its unique interior and further bolstered their claim it was a meteorite. Then on February 16th, they published an article about it on their website where they proposed the name Astomulyo Meteorite to “perpetuate natural phenomena in the village”. They also stressed the point that townspeople shouldn’t drink water after soaking the meteorite in it, citing several easily-oxidized heavy metal elements they found in the meteorite that can damage body tissue if consumed in sufficient quantities.

In March, Muhtajam’s 2.2 kg stone was sold and exported. Then, after classification at ASU by Dr. Laurence Garvie, the meteorite was registered in the April 23rd, 2021 edition of the Meteoritical Bulletin database as the first ever H7-melt breccia.

The 59.7 gram slice shown in this MPOD came from the 2.5 kg stone. Photo 1 was taken face on and shows its size compared to a 1 cm cube. Photo 2 is of the same face, but at a more glancing angle to better display all of its metal. Photos 3 and 4 show the original polished and rough faces, respectively, under natural light (it has since been polished on both sides).

Obviously Punggur is full of metal (an interesting crystal can be seen in Photo 5’s 3D crossed-eyes image). I received this slice unetched and lightly coated with a clear protectant (Photo 6), but similar to Portales Valley (MPOD 200821 from Tucson Meteorites), it did indeed exhibit crystallization patterns after etching (four examples can be seen in Photo 7, with Photo 8 showing a fifth under two different angles of light; other metal features are illustrated in Photo 9, and Photo 10 shows an interesting metal structure at a silicate boundary). Some of the silicate matrix contains areas with emerald green crystals, as seen in Photo 11 (Photo 12’s) crossed-eyes 3D image shows a nice example on the left, as well as some broken fusion crust at the edge of the slice).