Submit a Picture

Where is My Picture?!

The Queue

Met Name

Met Type

Thin Sections

1.2 grams.   Lunar (feldsp. breccia)

TKW 74.3 grams. Fall not observed. Purchased May 2015, Agadir, Morocco.
 

Steve writes:

When my wife and I visit schools to give presentations on meteorites, our display and pass-around examples always includes Photo 1's 12" x 8" Riker mount. The kids get a real kick out of being able to see actual pieces of the moon and Mars, and they're usually most impressed by the 221 gram NWA 10203 half-stone in the middle. But for reasons I'll describe shortly, my personal favorite is the NWA 10272 slice seen in the upper right corner of Photo 1 and blown up in Photos 2 and 3.

NWA 10272 is a feldspathic lunar breccia that was originally purchased by Pierre-Marie Pelé and Fabien Kuntz from an Agadir, Morocco dealer in May 2015 (the dealer had previously acquired it from nomads, so the actual location of the find is not known). It originally weighed a bit over 91 grams (despite the MetBul listing of 74.3), but with 15 grams used for classification and more lost to cutting and polishing, only about 38 grams remained for sale. At 1.2 grams, the slice here is just slightly more than half the size of the largest from the original stone, but in my opinion it's one of the more aesthetic because of how the eucrite-like light gray lithology displays against the other darker one (not all slices had both). The reason it's my favorite planetary in our collection is that the curve formed at the boundary between the two lithologies, their stark contrast, and the various sized and colored clasts in the darker half all combine to remind me a little of a view of the moon in space (I know, it's my pareidolia!).

While NWA 10272 is considered to be paired with Galb Inal and NWAs 10149, 10172, 10203, and 10291, among them it's unique in its aforementioned highly contrasting lithologies (as an example, while NWA 10272's different lithologies are obvious from any angle, NWA 10203 requires just the right light to show its different ones, as demonstrated by Photo 4's comparison of two pictures taken with light reflecting from opposite angles).