Month: August 2024

Viñales is a very new meteorite. This meteorite fell on February 1st, 2019 in the province of Pinar del Rio, Cuba. Unlike the Chelyabinsk event, in this case no people were injured although a loud sonic boom was heard by the locals and recorded in a video (see link below). Its smoke trail was recorded by several people and it was seen in Cuba and even from the United States, where the weather radars recorded the event. Fragments have been mainly found in Viñales, a town in which people live on tourism and tobacco production. Due to the extensive rains, plants in the area are very tall, which makes finding the meteorites an almost imposible task. Viñales has been officially classified now as an L6 chondrite with shock veins and some inclusions of melt rock (breccia). Video of the smoke trail and sonic boom:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KusbaK-B1DE.

This is the main mass of the Viñales meteorite fall. It is completely covered in fusion crust, with regmaglypts and sits comfortably in several faces. Weight is slightly over 10 kilos.

Dronino is an iron meteorite and hence it probably comes from the core of asteroids that were destroyed by impacts with other bodies. It is an alloy of iron-nickel mainly although it contains other trace elements.

Structurally it is an ataxite which means “without structure”. Ataxites have >18% Nickel content and do not show Widmanstatten lines upon etching, hence their name. Most of the meteoric iron is kamacite with minor amounts of taenite.

The first piece was found in 2000 while mushroom collecting. The finder kept it for years and it was definitely identified as a meteorite in 2003 by a Russian museum.

In July 2007 african nomads reported in Mali a smoke cloud and some detonations but no fireball was seen. This meteorite fall happened on the 2nd or 3rd of July but exact day is undetermined. In autumn and winter of the same year many fragments were finally found with a total known weight of about 100 kilograms. This meteorite is classified as a chondrite H5, S3, W0.