5.1g NWA 17270 Lunar Melt Breccia Meteorite - From Our Moon!

When it comes to lunar meteorites, you’d be hard-pressed to find one with the kinds of colors and what we call “galaxy swirls” on one such as what NWA 17270 displays. This highly polished lunar meteorite is a perfect way to get your hands on an affordable price-per-gram lunar meteorite from our moon. Make this one the focal point of your display! 

What makes specimens like this especially compelling is the evidence of later, violent transformation. Subsequent impact events—likely tied to periods such as the Late Heavy Bombardment—subjected the rock to intense shock and heat, partially melting it before it rapidly cooled again.

This process creates what is known as a melt breccia: a fusion of older crystalline fragments suspended within a once-molten matrix. Under magnification, you can often see ghostly outlines of earlier mineral grains alongside newly crystallized textures, capturing multiple episodes of lunar history in a single specimen.

In some cases, shock effects may even produce microscopic features associated with shock metamorphism, subtly altering the crystal structure of the minerals themselves. These transformations are not just aesthetic—they provide critical clues about the intensity and frequency of impacts that have shaped the Moon’s surface over billions of years.

About Lunar Meteorites: 

Unlike Earth, the Moon has only an extremely tenuous exosphere and lacks the substantial atmospheric protection that shields our planet from most incoming meteoroids. As a result, asteroid impacts occur frequently on the lunar surface. These powerful collisions can eject lunar material into space, and on rare occasions, some of these fragments are propelled into Earth-crossing orbits. If a fragment survives its fiery passage through Earth's atmosphere and reaches the ground, it becomes known as a meteorite.

When a suspected lunar meteorite is recovered—often by experienced meteorite hunters—a sample is submitted for scientific analysis. Using petrographic thin sections, chemical testing, and isotopic studies, Meteoriticists compare the specimen's composition to known lunar materials. Its lunar origin is then confirmed through a combination of mineralogical, chemical, and isotopic signatures that match lunar samples returned to Earth by NASA's Apollo missions. Once classified, these rare extraterrestrial specimens find their way into museums, universities, research collections, and private collections around the world.

The Interstellar Collection, LLC is acknowledged by the IMCA (#3950), the Global Meteorite Association (GMA #042), the Meteorite Club and Strewnify. We unconditionally guarantee the authenticity of all of our meteorites.