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 Kashkay & 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 cleaned, and it looks like someone used a stick to pry compacted dirt out of the thumb-prints.

5.9 kg