SA Museum moves 1-tonne Huckitta meteorite from Science Centre basement to the Adelaide Planetarium

It spent 4.5 billion years in a desert then 20 years in a basement, but when South Australians emerge from our seclusion, so too will this meteorite.

Paul Curnow from the Adelaide Planetarium with SA Museum earth sciences senior collections manager Ben McHenry with the Huckitta meteorite.

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It’s been hidden away in a basement for the past two decades, but that doesn’t count for much when this meteorite is 4.5 billion years old.

And now the massive Huckitta meteorite is being moved from its storage at the SA Museum to the Planetarium at Mawson Lakes, where it will go on display once social gatherings return.

SA Museum senior collections manager Ben McHenry says touching the cold, hard meteorite is “quite a thrill”.

“You're touching the oldest thing that you'll ever touch in your life, something 4.5 billion years old from the formation of our solar system,” he says.

“Meteorites are pretty amazing things. Before we started sending objects into outer space and landed on the moon and things like that, the only way we knew what the solar system was made of was by analysing meteorites.”

This world-famous object was hidden in the basement of the museum’s Science Centre since major renovations during 1998-2000.

A slice of the specimen, taken from the main bulk with great difficulty in 1938 (it took over five days to make two cuts), is still on display in the museum’s Meteorite Gallery.

The Huckitta meteorite is a rare type of metallic meteorite called a “pallasite”, one of only 95 in the world.

The Huckitta meteorite was recovered from a cattle station in the Northern Territory. Picture: SA Museum.

“It's a bit like a Christmas pudding, where the nickel-iron is the batter,” Mr McHenry says. “And it's full of crystals of olivine, a silicate mineral, the fruit mixed through the metal.”

These ingredients are from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

“So when the solar system was formed and things were coalescing out of the dust cloud, you had the gravity of Jupiter and the gravity of the sun pulling in this one place,” Mr McHenry said.

“The lumps didn’t coalesce into larger pieces that could eventually form a planet like Earth with a nickel-iron core.”

The Huckitta meteorite was recovered in 1937 from a cattle station in the Northern Territory, where it was used as a mustering point and known as “The Black Rock”.

Samples of it were sent across the world and can be found in various collections including at Fort Worth, Texas; Arizona State University, Tempe; the Natural History Museum, London; Max Planck Institute, Mainz; and the National Museum of Natural History, Washington, D.C.