Found near each other. Lunar?

[OliviaSB]

I found these 2 rocks near each other in NM. Sorry that the inside of one is difficult to see, but looks just like the first inside. They are both weakly attracted to a magnet. While looking through my meteorite book, they closely resemble that of a lunar meteorite, or can someone identify it as terrestrial?

 

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[OliviaSB]

Example of lunar meteorite online

 

[galenrog]

I do not believe you have any meteorites among those for which you provided images. That said, it is very difficult, even for experienced professionals to positively identify meteorites from images alone.

If you truly believe your rocks to be meteorites, lunar or otherwise, contact a certified meteorite laboratory. Ask them to take a look.

Time for more coffee.

 

[OliviaSB]

I do not believe you have any meteorites among those for which you provided images. That said, it is very difficult, even for experienced professionals to positively identify meteorites from images alone.

If you truly believe your rocks to be meteorites, lunar or otherwise, contact a certified meteorite laboratory. Ask them to take a look.

Time for more coffee.

Thanks. I do believe I have a few, and I do plan on sending them out for classification. Thanks.

Oh, and both are brown on streak test.

 

[Red-Coat]

I wish you luck.

A large part of the issue about possible meteorites being posted here is the starting assumption. If that starting assumption is “I think this is a (lunar, martian or whatever) meteorite” and “I’ve found matching pictures on the internet” then that’s not a good starting position.

If you confine your searches using those constraints then very often you will find matching pictures of meteorite specimens (at least at a superficial level). The counter-position is that if you start with an assumption that you have found an igneous rock with brecciation that’s slightly magnetic and widen your search on that basis you will find a much larger number of matches to things that aren’t meteorites. Potential matches will outnumber meteorites by a ratio of hundreds of thousands to one.

Your particular rock is clearly an igneous or volcanic breccia which, for New Mexico, would not be an uncommon thing. It has some fractures, which can be a good indication of impact effects seen in meteorites, but volcanic rock can have those too. There’s no evidence of fusion crust, which might help confirm a meteorite. From a probability point of view, the odds are stacked against you. Meteorites are of course much less common than terrestrial rocks by huge orders of magnitude and, within the meteorite group, perhaps 1 in 1,000 finds will have a lunar origin.

Other than that, it’s not possible to confirm something like a lunar meteorite based on a few medium quality pictures. It would need close examination under high magnification and/or detailed petrological analysis to distinguish between terrestrial and meteoritical origins. Yours can’t be ruled out from those pictures (for example if there were vesicles we could rule it out), but neither can it be confirmed… except to say the probability of it being a meteorite (lunar or otherwise) is extremely low and that New Mexico is full of terrestrial rocks which look like that.