Qualla: Jbilet Winselwan Meteorite

Jbilet Winselwan Meteorite: Introduction

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MJCato, CC BY-SA 4.0. In June 2013, a meteorite hunter walked out of the town of Smara, in the Western Sahara, and came back with stones that did not belong on Earth. They were dark, brittle, and unremarkable to the untrained eye - the largest no bigger than a grapefruit. But scattered across a strewn field just seven miles from town lay something rare: fragments of the early solar system, almost untouched by the long fall through time. Today fragments of that find sit in laboratories around the world, standing in for asteroids that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to reach.

Image: MJCato | CC BY-SA 4.0

Jbilet Winselwan Meteorite: A Stone Older Than the Sun's Planets

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MJCato, CC BY-SA 4.0. Jbilet Winselwan is a CM-type carbonaceous chondrite - among the most primitive material known, a chemical snapshot of the cloud of dust and gas from which the planets formed. What makes this particular fall extraordinary is its condition. It has a low shock stage and a low weath...

Image: MJCato | CC BY-SA 4.0

Jbilet Winselwan Meteorite: The Find

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MJCato, CC BY-SA 4.0. The discovery was reported in early June 2013 by a hunter from Smara, though the true find date is reckoned earlier, given how slowly word travels out of the deep desert. The strewn field's accessibility, close to town, drew a rush of meteorite hunters through the summer of 2013....

Image: MJCato | CC BY-SA 4.0

Jbilet Winselwan Meteorite: A Stand-In for the Asteroids

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MJCato, CC BY-SA 4.0. Reaching an asteroid is staggeringly expensive. Japan's Hayabusa2 mission flew to the asteroid Ryugu and back to return a few grams of dark, carbon-rich rock. Jbilet Winselwan offers scientists a cheaper, far more abundant analog for exactly that kind of C-type asteroid material ...

Image: MJCato | CC BY-SA 4.0

Jbilet Winselwan Meteorite: Reading a Broken World

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MJCato, CC BY-SA 4.0. Cut a thin slice of Jbilet Winselwan, hold it to the light, and you are looking at the violent biography of a small world. The stone is intensely brecciated - shattered and re-cemented from fragments of different histories. A single thin section can hold several distinct litholog...

Image: MJCato | CC BY-SA 4.0