METEORIC FRAGMENT (AEROLITE)

PROVENANCE: Campo del Cielo area (sector of Santiago de Santiago, Alberdi and Moreno Departments), on the border with the province of Chaco.

ORIGIN: cosmic, spatial

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS: Appearance of a dark mineral mass. Its weight is 22,200 kilograms. According to mineralogical classification the meteorite contains iron in greater proportion, nickel, copper, quartz, pyrites, silica; these elements in minimal proportions.

OTHER CONSIDERATIONS: The museum specimen on display has been taken from the Campo del Cielo deposit, located in the northwest of the province of Santiago del Estero and in the northwest of the province of Chaco, covering an extensive area of many square kilometres.

This site, together with two other similar sites in France and Russia, are the largest terrestrial attraction fields and have been hit by a meteor shower from outer space. The most famous meteorite precipitated there is the one known as “Mesón de hierro”, a large mass of many tons which gave rise to indigenous legends and which led to numerous expeditions to locate and rescue it since colonial times in 1576, 1774, 1786 and 1803.

Recently, since 1962, the area referred to in the Chaco sector has been investigated by numerous scientists, among them Dr. in Geochemistry, William N. Cassidy, of the University of Cologne and later by the University of Pittsburg in the United States.

From the report published in the journal “Science” of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the following conclusion is drawn: “That some of the meteoric fragments lying in Campo del Cielo belonged to a small satellite, a small moon that would have crashed when it was in a very low and close orbit to the earth”. This would have happened more than six thousand years ago according to desk studies carried out at the University of Colombia, where their geological laboratories analysed the evidence sent, which indicated that the craters of the celestial objects located were caused by a satellite in a very low orbit, which fell and fragmented in an area of approximately 70 km.

Radioactive carbon (C14) tests show that the craters are 5,800 years old. The satellite was then in a decaying orbit, descending 15 km in a straight line in the Campo del Cielo sector.

It should be noted that the investigations carried out by the American scientists were financed with funds from the N.A.S.A. and the U.S. government’s space agency.