Campo del Cielo refers to a group of iron meteorites and the area in Argentina where they were found.

In 1576, the governor of a province in northern Argentina commissioned the military to search for a huge mass of iron, which he had heard that natives used for their weapons.

The expedition found a large mass of metal protruding out of the soil and collected a few samples, which were described as being of unusual purity.

The next expedition, led by Rubin de Celis in 1783, used explosives to clear the ground around the mass and found that it was likely a single stone.

[7] In 1969 El Chaco (the second-largest mass at 28,840 kilograms (63,580 lb)) was discovered 5 metres (16 ft) below the surface using a metal detector.

Currently, more than 100 tonnes of Campo del Cielo fragments have been discovered, making it the heaviest set of such finds on Earth.

[8] In 1990 an Argentine highway police officer foiled a plot by Robert Haag to steal El Chaco.

Due to a suspected lack of precision when El Chaco was weighed in 1980, the latter was reweighed with the same instruments and discovered to only have a mass of 28,840 kilograms (63,580 lb), making Gancedo the largest Campo del Cielo fragment recovered.

Such an unusual distribution suggests that a large body entered the Earth's atmosphere and broke into pieces, which fell to the ground.