Post from another world - Austria / II. Republic of Austria 2006

The milled meteorite applied to the stamp by the Austrian State Printing House in a specially developed process was examined at the Natural History Museum Vienna - an institution which has achieved the highest international reputation in connection with a 200-year tradition of collecting and exploring meteorites -Chondrit (stone meteorite, subgroup "Ordinary Chondrites") classified. The investigation by the Museum of Natural History in Vienna clearly shows that an original meteorite was used for the stamp. The meteorite is most likely from the asteroid belt, a collection of hundreds of thousands of pebbles ranging in size from pebble to rocky, moving around the Sun on a path between the planets of Mars and Jupiter (orbit roughly three times the Earth-Sun distance). The chemical composition of the mineral olivine (indicated as Fa18) is characteristic of this type of meteorite and can also be verified by the meteorite dust on the stamp. The chemical and physical properties of the investigated meteorite - as well as all other meteorites - are such that they pose no threat to human health. A no longer necessary for the production of the stamp part of the nearly 19 kilograms heavy meteorite was deposited in the Natural History Museum as a reference sample and can also be visited there.