What does NWA mean in a meteorite name?
NWA stands for Northwest Africa. It is the label given to meteorites bought or found in the Sahara region of north-west Africa when the exact place of discovery is not known, followed by a number, as in NWA 7034.
Most meteorites are named after the place where they fell or were found: a town, a farm, a river. That system breaks down in the Sahara, where thousands of stones are picked up by nomads and professional searchers and then pass through traders in Morocco and neighbouring countries. By the time a specimen reaches a scientist, nobody can say reliably whether it came from Morocco, Algeria, Mali or Mauritania, let alone the precise spot.
The solution was a catch-all name. Northwest Africa, shortened to NWA, covers desert meteorites from that broad region whose find location is uncertain. Each newly classified meteorite gets the next number in the series, so NWA 869 is a common ordinary chondrite, while NWA 7034, nicknamed "Black Beauty", is a remarkable breccia from Mars containing some of the oldest Martian material known. The series has grown to many thousands of entries, which tells you how productive the Saharan trade has been since the late 1990s.
The number says nothing about type or quality. A low number simply means an earlier classification. Stones from the same fall may also end up with several different NWA numbers if they were sold separately, a problem known as pairing, which researchers try to untangle using chemistry and texture.
You will meet similar labels elsewhere. When the find site is known within a defined desert area, the meteorite usually carries that area's name instead, such as Dar al Gani (DaG) in Libya or Jiddat al Harasis in Oman. Seeing NWA on a label is not a warning sign in itself; it simply records honest uncertainty about where the stone was collected. What matters is that the meteorite has been officially classified and approved, so its name and number appear in the official record.