The way it works is that meteorites are named based on how much certainty we have about where they come from. When we think the coordinates are accurate, we can name them after very local features. For things like NWA and Sahara meteorites, we have some confidence that they come from northwest Africa and the Sahara in general, but not much more than that. The hallmark of the Nova series is that we don't have any good information about where they were found, or, in some of the early ones, we thought that information was false.

Nova 011 simply turned up in a market in Russia.There is no accompanying find story. Perhaps it's from Russia, perhaps it's an NWA, who knows. If there was some kind of find story indicating a local origin, we might have named it differently, perhaps South Russia or something like that.

Jeff

On 4/20/2012 12:20 PM, Michael Gilmer wrote:
Greetings Bulletin Geeks,

There are 3 new approvals today.  Two NWA's - a CK5 and L5.  And one
new "Nova" find - an iron from Russia.

Question - it has been my understanding that Nova names are reserved
for those meteorites with dubious location data.  So, why is it that
many of the Labenne finds have not been renamed as Nova finds?  And
this new Russian iron seems to have find data similar to the majority
of NWA's, so why aren't more NWA's classified as Novas?  Is it because
there are just too many NWA's?

http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meteor/metbull.php?sea=&sfor=names&ants=&falls=&valids=&stype=contains&lrec=50&map=ge&browse=&country=All&srt=name&categ=All&mblist=All&rect=&phot=&snew=1&pnt=Normal%20table&dr=&page=0

Best regards,

MikeG


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