Jesenice meteorite, Jesenice, Sloveniai

Regional Level Types
Jesenice meteorite	Meteorite Fall Location
Jesenice	Municipality
Slovenia	Country

Ordinary Chondrite (L6, S3, W0/1)
Fell, 9 April 2009; 3.67 kg, 3 stones

A bright fireball appeared over Carinthia and the Karavanke Mountains. The meteoroid entered the atmosphere at a steep angle and disintegrated into a large number of fragments after more than 4 s of flight with loud explosions heard in and around Jesenice. Automated fireball recorders and infrasound detectors apparently aided in the recovery of 3 fragments in the following weeks and months. The first stone (and largest [2.35 kg]) recovered was shattered at impact into numerous pieces. The 2nd and 3rd smaller stones (361g , 956 g, resp.) survived their falls almost intact. The combination of seismic, infrasound, photoelectric, and photographic data indicate that the incoming meteoroid was in a more or less typical Apollo asteroid orbit bringing it from the inner asteroid belt into the realm of the earth's orbit before its final impact.

The rock is fine-grained and shows brownish taints (weathering) on surfaces of the broken pieces. Shock veins were detected. In thin section Jesenice is highly recrystallized with relatively large plagioclase grains and a few relic chondrules are visible. These textures and its highly equilibrated olivine (Fa25) and Ca-poor pyroxene (Fs21) are all characteristic of type L6 chondrites. Undulatory extinction in olivine and plagioclase, planar fractures in olivine, and the shock veins are indicative of moderate pre-terrestrial shock. However, Jesenice is not a totally typical L6 chondrite. Jesenice is actually significantly less shocked than most L6 ordinary chondrites which have experienced even more extreme shock. Jesenice's K-40/Ar-40 gas retention age (~4.3 Ga) is much older than than those of most L6 chondrites. Furthermore, its cosmic ray exposure age (~5 Ma) does not conform with the large cluster of ~7 Ma exposure ages of many L6 chondrites. The suggestion is, of course, that while the Jesenice material may well have originated on the putative L chondrite original parent body (OPB), it may have spent some intervening eons on a different 'daughter' asteroid than other L-chondrites before becoming part of the small meteoroid which would eventually collide with the earth.

Jesenice is but one of 269 observed meteorite falls that are currently classified as exactly 'L6' ordinary chondrites. The L6 petrologic type is the largest subset of the L type (low bulk iron) ordinary chondrite geochemical group with 401 unambiguously assigned members which represent ~40% of all witnessed falls [as of 26 Dec 2015].

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