Kainsaz (meteorite)
In Kainsaz is an observed meteorite fall of 13 September 1937 14:15 near the Kainsaz- collective farm , Muslyumovo District, Tatarstan , Russia .
After a fireball visible within 80 km , at least 40 individual masses with a total weight of more than 215 kg fell on a 40 km stretch between Kastiljowa in the south-east and Kainsaz in the north-west. According to eyewitness accounts, the case was followed by five or six loud detonations. The actual fireball and its smoke trail could not be seen from the fall area.
The elliptical scattered field was visited a few days after the fall by the Russian scientist AS Selivanov, who was able to secure 15 masses from the Kainsaz case by the onset of winter and bring them to the Mineralogical Fersman Museum in Moscow. Among these was the main mass of the case, weighing 102 kg, which is still on display in Moscow today. Selivanov made further finds a few hundred meters southeast of Kainsaz (a 53 kg mass), at Tash-Elga (a 27.5 kg mass) and at Krasny Yar (a 22 kg mass). The impact hollows had the diameter of the meteorite in all cases and were each about as deep as the greatest vertical extent of the respective mass.
The Kainsaz meteorite belongs to the rarer group of carbonaceous chondrites . The mineralogical - petrographic analysis revealed a C03.2 type with a shock grade S2 and a weathering grade of W0. The coordinates of the case today with 55 ° 26 '0 " N , 53 ° 15' 0" O indicated (main location of the mass).
The remote and hardly explored stray field of the meteorite fall was forgotten during the Second World War and was only rediscovered in 2000 by Russian meteorite prospectors. They found that the angle of the central axis of the stray field was actually 39 ° and not 47 ° as it was in Selivanov's notes. In total, more than 32 other individuals and fragments with masses of 50 g to 2 kg were found in campaigns from 2000 to 2007. The German meteorite researcher Svend Buhl took part in the campaign in 2005, collected and translated eyewitness reports as well as passages from Selivanov's notes and published the current status of research into the stray field in an article for Meteorite Magazine.
Kainsaz has not yet been published in the Meteoritical Society's Meteoritical Bulletin , but is officially recognized by the Meteoritical Society. Both the MetBull database and the Catalog of Meteorites list Kainsaz as an observed meteorite fall.
literature
- LH Ahrens, JP Willis: The Chemical Composition of Kainsaz and Efremovka : Meteoritics, Volume 8, No. 2, p. 133
- Monica M. Grady: Catalog of Meteorites, Fifth Edition . Cambridge University Press, Natural History Museum, London 2000