Northwest Africa 5667 (NWA 5667)

Northwest Africa 5667 was initially purchased as a 396g stone from Morocco during 2008. The following year a few other stones were purchased by the same buyer bringing the Total Known Weight to just 1080g including the initial stone. The meteorite was classified as an L3 Breccia with a Shock Rating of S2.

It was obvious that NWA 5667 was fresh, but on slicing... this meteorite would turn out to be one of the freshest chondrites found in Northwest Africa to date. In fact it is actually one of the freshest L3 chondrites ever found anywhere in the world including falls with a clearly very short terrestrial life.

It is a very distinctive chondrite with a bright white to blue/grey colour covered in rich black fusion crust. Chondrules are distinctly crisp with varying sizes and shapes. Some slices of this meteorite which also display a pale-grey breccia lithology which is not quite as abundant with chondrules. One of the other interesting features are the pockets of troilite (FeS) throughout the stones. The slice below has one of these at centre-right near the outer edge. The other obvious feature of this specimen is the large black inclusion which appears to be a shock-melt pocket.

Since NWA 5667 was initially studied, several other stones have been found which may be paired including NWA 5701 and NWA 6168. A slice of NWA 5701 is pictured below for comparison.

The specimens below are part of the Meteorites Australia Collection (MA.09.0001 & MA.09.0068 respectively).