NWA 7789, LL3.1-LL6

This stunning 8.2 kilogram polymict breccia was recovered as a broken individual.  We don’t usually cut stones much, but this stone began with a large, almost perfectly flat, broken face; we had a thin end-cut and two slices taken off, resulting in a spectacular window.  We donated a full slice to UCLA and a ~1 gram sliver from cutting for analysis, and the chip apparently came out as “LL4.”  The full slice is currently on display in the UCLA Meteorite Gallery, labelled as an “LL3-6,” despite the bulletin write-up.  It’s clearly a polymict breccia with equilibrated, type three, and carbonaceous material (see below!).  The stone remains ~90% intact, as pictured.

Here’s a link to the Meteoritical Bulletin write-up:Screen Shot 2014-01-14 at 12.33.28 AM
January 2016 update: this stone is paired with NWA 7676, an LL3.5 (1) (2).

Eric Twelker continues on his website: “Originally the stone was a single 18.33kg oriented stone with black fusion crust that was broken into fragments by the finder.”

The owner of the 2-3 kilogram fragment pictured above described the mass as being one complete stone of many kilograms, broken in several pieces, that was missing one large chunk (presumably the ~8 kg NWA 7789).

February 2019 update: I just became aware of another pairing: NWA 11905, a ~7 kilogram LL3.1-LL4-LL5 breccia (1) (2) (3).  The stone was extensively studied by Dr. Carl Agee, who looked at every lithology in detail:

I found this pretty interesting.  Three different labs published three pretty different analyses for the same stone.  None of them are wrong.  The stone is mostly ~LL4 material, and large slices from all pairings clearly contain pristine type-3 clasts.  Our fragment contains a few obvious type-6 clasts, and one relatively metal-rich clast that looks like exotic L-chondrite material to me.

The ~7 kilogram cut fragment pictured below may be the largest remaining piece of the original 18+ kilogram stone.  Or there might be larger pieces out there: there are a number of “LL3-6” NWAs in the bulletin…and countless LL3s and LL4s…  I’ll update this page with pairings as I come across them.

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