Yardymly, IAB

At 7:05 AM on November 24, 1959, lucky eyewitnesses in Azerbaijan were treated to a spectacular sight: a fireball brighter than the Sun crossed the sky from Southwest to Northeast, culminating in a series of deafening booms.

The fall was documented by Kashkai & Aliev in The Structure and Material Composition of the ‘Yardymlinsk’ Iron Meteorite Shower, Meteoritika, vol. 20 (1961) – I was able to track down a hard copy of this article, but don’t have a PDF to share here yet.

According to Kashkai & Aliyev (Meteoritika, 1961), this 5.9 kg specimen of Aroos was the second mass of six recovered:

Later references, like Grady’s Catalogue of Meteorites (5th ed.) (2000), gave different find orders for the masses, often omitted a few of them, and renamed the fall Jardymlinsky, which became Yardymly.

The iron has not been well-studied, but cohenite-rich coarse octahedrites like this are almost always IAB-mg.

This specimen has never been washed or cleaned: it looks like someone used a stick to pry compacted dirt out of the thumb-prints.

5.9 kg