Sikhote-Alin meteorite

Sikhote -Alin iron meteorite was one who entered the Earth's atmosphere on the morning of February 12, 1947 with an approximate mass of 200 tons and a diameter of about 4 meters and a speed of 50,000 km / h. The meteorite was racing as a race car on the Siberian Sikhote -Alin Mountains ( eastern Siberia, 500 km north of Vladivostok ) away, where he left a smoke trail of more than 30 kilometers in length. The meteorite finally burst, with several thousand fragments rained down as a meteor shower in an elliptical stray field of 4 km wide and 12 km long. This created more than 120 craters; the largest was 6 feet deep and had a diameter of 28 meters.

To date, over 8000 meteorite fragments were collected with a total mass of 30 tons in the rough area; the largest single fragment weighed 1.75 tons. Many of the fragments have been greatly deformed on impact with the frozen ground and are referred to as " shrapnel ".

The meteorite was described by more than 240 eyewitnesses. One of them was the Russian artist Pyotr Ivanovich Medvedev, who held the event in an oil painting. The painting was later used as a template for a special stamp, which was issued on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the meteoroid from the Soviet Union.

The original meteoroid comes from the asteroid belt. Its remains are classified as gross octahedrite Group IIB.

Chemical composition: 93 % iron; 5.9% nickel; 0.42% cobalt; 0.46% phosphorus; 0.28% sulfur; 161 ppm of germanium; 52 ppm gallium; 0.03 ppm iridium.

Sikhote -Alin section of a meteorite with troilite inclusions and Neumann lines