Provenance:  I am the main mass holder so you have perfect provenance.

Process:  I wanted these to be as good as they could so I worked with Craig Zliman of Minnesota Meteorites who cut on a diamond saw, polished, etched, and sealed them.  

Collector's Notes: This is a beautiful mesosiderite with and excellent presentation of etched free metal and large pyroxene crystals.  I kept just over half the total known weight as my main mass display piece.  There were only a handful of thin slices made and this is the last one. 

Class information:  Mesosiderites present us with many questions.  This is due to their unusual composition and limited sample set due to their rarity.  They are roughly equal parts silicate rock and iron-nickel metal. The silicate portion is mostly basaltic with olivine, Ca-rich feldspar, and pyroxene fragments. These breccias formed through violent impacts on a differentiated asteroid, mixing impactor, crustal, and core material before slow cooling and varying degrees of metamorphism. How do differentiated components became mixed back up?  This requires a massive impact between parent bodies which then consolidated but did not re-differentiate. Then a subsequent impact liberated the pieces from the parent body (possibly destroying it completely) which sent some fragments eventually landing on Earth.  Some propose 16 Psyche as a possible source, while others have looked at similarities to the H.E.D. group. The best part of meteoritics, for me, is working to understand the formation of our solar system.  With the unique blend of crust and core components, mesosiderites are important for understanding planetary differentiation and the collision history of the early Solar System.