Northwest Africa 4932

Lunar Meteorite: Northwest Africa (NWA) 4932

northern Africa

Exterior of NWA 4932.
(Photo courtesy of Greg Hupé)

Sawn face of NWA 4932.
(Photo courtesy of Greg Hupé)

Up close in the lab. NWA 4932 contains many small grains of iron-nickel metal.
(Photo by Randy Korotev)

It's one of the most mafic of the feldspathic lunar meteorites.

It's a crystalline impact-melt breccia.

It's compositionally and texturally very similar to SaU 300, collected ~3400 km away. The two stones may have been blasted off the Moon by a common impact.

from The Meteoritical Bulletin, No. 94, September 2008. Meteoritics & Planetary Science 43, 1551–1588 (2008)

Algeria
Find: October 2007

Achondrite (lunar, feldspathic breccia)

History: Purchased by Greg Hupé from a Moroccan dealer in Tagounite, Morocco in October 2007.

Physical characteristics: A single, light colored 93.3 g stone. The interior is light gray, mostly very fine grained with a few white clasts (Fig. 2), and prominent but sparsely distributed metal grains (surrounded by hydroxide staining).

Petrography (A. Irving and S. Kuehner, UWS): Breccia composed of small gabbroic to troctolitic clasts (granular aggregates of rounded olivine grains and calcic plagioclase enclosed within low-Ca pyroxene with accessory Ti-chromite and troilite), sparse large grains of kamacite (up to 1 mm, partly altered to iron hydroxide) and rare large grains of silica polymorph in a dominant, very fine grained matrix of the same phases. There are secondary (terrestrial) veinlets and small patches of calcite.

Geochemistry: Low-Ca pyroxene (Fs_22.3-22.8Wo_5.9-5.3, FeO/MnO = 51.9-53.0; Fs_20.8-36.1Wo_7.4-12.0, FeO/MnO = 56.5-58.3), olivine (Fa_27.2-36.9, FeO/MnO = 87.7-96.3), plagioclase (An_94.9-96.4Or_0.3-0.1). Bulk composition (R. Korotev, WUSL): FeO 8.5 wt.%, Sc 19.2 ppm, Sm 1.1 ppm, Th 0.6 ppm, Ni 450 ppm.

Classification: Achondrite (lunar, feldspathic breccia).

Specimens: A total of 18.7 g and one polished thin section are on deposit at UWS. The main mass is held by Mr. G. Hupé.

More Information

Meteoritical Bulletin Database

NWA 4932

References

Korotev R. L., Irving A. J., and Bunch T. E. (2008) Keeping up with the lunar meteorites – 2008 (abstract). In Lunar and Planetary Science XXXIX, abstract no. 1209, 39th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, Houston.

Korotev R. L, Zeigler R. A., Jolliff B. L., Irving A. J., and Bunch T. E. (2009) Compositional and lithological diversity among brecciated lunar meteorites of intermediate iron composition. Meteoritics & Planetary Science 44, 1287–1322.

Chemical Classification

Overview | NWA 4932

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Prepared by:

Randy L. Korotev

Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences
Washington University in St. Louis

Please don't contact me about the meteorite you think you’ve found until you read this and this.

e-mail: korotev@wustl.edu

Last revised: 23-Oct-2009