Campo del Cielo Meteorite — Complete Individual with Hole


About 4000 years after having collided with Earth, Campo del Cielo (“Valley of the Sky”) meteorites were first written about in 1576 by Spanish explorers when their unearthly origins had yet to be understood. It was a “Campo” that was the first large meteorite displayed at the British Museum of Natural History, and several large Campo del Cielo masses can be found today in the finest museums in the world. The frictional stresses encountered by the large iron mass during atmospheric passage caused the body to explode and break up into thousands of pieces. The larger iron fragments ploughed into the ground at such a high velocity that an array of at least 26 impact craters formed, the largest being 91 ´115 meters. The meteorite is from chemical group IAB, believed to have been birthed from the collision of a meteoritic projectile traveling at cosmic velocity with the surface of another asteroid.

Christie's would like to thank Dr. Alan E. Rubin at the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, University of California, Los Angeles for his assistance in preparing this catalogue note.