Name: Queen Alexandra Range 94281 This is an OFFICIAL meteorite name. Abbreviation: QUE 94281 Observed fall: No Year found: 1994 Country: Antarctica [Collected by US Antarctic Search for Meteorites program (ANSMET)] Mass: 23.4 g
Macroscopic Description: Roberta Score and Marilyn Lindstrom This is a very strange meteorite. It is highly glassy and inhomogeneous. The exterior is black with thick, shiny glass on one side and an irregular, rough surface on the other. The glass is black, conchoidal, vesicular in places, and has melted into many of the abundant cavities. The interior is very inhomogeneous. This meteorite is wedge-shaped, ranging in thickness from 3 mm to 10 mm. At the thin end, the rough black material has small white flecks in it, while the middle region consists of a chaotic aphanitic material. The thick end is a coarse-grained breccia with abundant angular white, yellow, and black mineral and lithic clasts up to 3 mm across. Two 2 mm-thick glassy, vesicular, black veins cut across the different areas. Oxidation is lightly scattered throughout the meteorite. It will be difficult to do detailed sampling of this complex breccia.
Thin Section (,4) Description: Brian Mason The section shows a microbreccia of pale brown pyroxene and colorless plagioclase clasts, up to 1.2 mm across, in a comminuted groundmass of these minerals. Colorless fusion crust rims part of the section, which is cut by a 1 mm-wide veinlet of vesicular black glass. Pyroxene compositions show a wide range: Wo4-30, Fs23-55, En25-66. Plagioclase composition is An91-97. A little olivine, Fa33-36, was analyzed, and one grain of silica polymorph, probably tridymite. Fusion crust composition is SiO2 47, Al2O3 16, FeO 13, MgO 9.1, CaO 12, K2O <0.1, TiO2 0.6, MnO 0.2, Na2O 0.5. The black glass has a similar but somewhat variable composition. The high FeO:MnO ratio indicates a lunar origin, and the meteorite has a composition of a basalt-rich breccia. Its composition appears to be intermediate between those of EET87521 (Geochim. Cosmochim Acta, v. 53, p. 3323, 1989) and Calcalong Creek (Nature, v. 352, p.614, 1991) and very similar to that of Y793274 (Proc. NIPR Symp. Antarct. Meteorites, v. 4, p. 3, 1991).