Iron, coarsest octahedrite – IIAB Maritime Territory, Siberia, Russia

This is a distinguished meteorite from the Sikhote-Alin event—the largest meteorite shower of the last several thousand years. Its journey began 320 million years ago, when a giant iron mass broke-off from its parent body in the asteroid belt and wandered through interplanetary space until it encountered Earth on 12 February 1947. When it slammed into the atmosphere it began to break apart, and then created a fireball brighter than the Sun as it sailed over the Sikhote-Alin Mountains in eastern Siberia. The shockwaves from the low altitude explosion of the main mass collapsed chimneys, shattered windows and uprooted trees. A 33 kilometer long smoke trail in the sky persisted for several hours, and many of the resulting meteorites produced impact craters as large as 26 meters—with nearly 200 craters having been catalogued. A famous painting of the event by artist and eye-witness P. I. Medvedev was reproduced as a postage stamp issued by the Soviet government in 1957 to commemorate the tenth anniversary of an event that observers likened to what was seemingly the end of the world. This is a fine example of an historic event, the largest meteorite shower of the modern era.