(Worthy Insights) – Scientists have identified two minerals never before seen on Earth in a meteorite weighing 15.2 metric tonnes (33,510 pounds).
The minerals came from a 70-gram (nearly 2.5-ounce) slice of the meteorite, which was discovered in Somalia in 2020 and is the ninth-largest meteorite ever found, according to a news release from the University of Alberta.
One mineral’s name — elaliite — derives from the space object itself, which is called the “El Ali” meteorite since it was found near the town of El Ali in central Somalia.
Herd named the second one elkinstantonite after Lindy Elkins-Tanton, vice president of Arizona State University’s Interplanetary Initiative. Elkins-Tanton is also a regents professor in that university’s School of Earth and Space Exploration and the principal investigator of NASA’s upcoming Psyche mission — a journey to a metal-rich asteroid orbiting the sun between Mars and Jupiter, according to the space agency. [ Source: CTV (Read More…) ]
Elkinstantonite and Elaliite was first formulated in a lab in the 1980’s but could not be categorized as a mineral until it was found in nature, which it was in 2022, when they were discovered in the meteorite.