[meteorite-list] Cracking Brahin Pallasite

From: almitt <almitt_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu Apr 22 09:52:23 2004
Message-ID: <3D6C1FE8.94F98515_at_kconline.com>

Hi Rob and all,

I have both Brahin and Brenham in my collection. My experience is the Brahin in rather
thick chunks with some outside crust (if kept proper) can be fairly stable. I don't
think Brahin is more stable than Brenham but rather the other way around. Mainly it
depends on the pieces and where they were found. I have a reasonably stable piece of
Brenham in my collection (fairly large slice with surface area) which hasn't caused me
any trouble but I monitor it. It was taken off a large mass from a major museum. I
have sold similar pieces of this and the buyers have stated with care it hasn't been a
problem. I don't think you can take it for granted though.

Brahin is cheap and if you put the effort in preservation (keeping it dry and out of
the humidity and avoid big temperature variations) I think it is a reasonable
pallasite. If you want a pallasite that is very stable then you will probably have to
pay $20 or more per gram. Brenham pieces that were collected in low ground and were
subject to a lot of moisture and so forth don't have a good life expectancy. I am sure
there will be many people that will be unhappy with their Brahin specimens (what is
left of them) in the next few years also.

--AL
Received on Tue 27 Aug 2002 08:57:12 PM PDT