Mechanical degradation of iron ore pellets can have important economic and environmental implications. The work initially describes a pneumatic gun device that has been developed for characterizing breakage of pellets, by impacting them one-by-one against a target at controlled velocities, angles and against different types of surfaces. It shows that body breakage probability was only a function of the normal component of the impact and that pellets presented higher resistance and lower variability when subjected to impact than to slow compression. Mass loss due to surface breakage was well described using a model that accounts for the energy dissipated in the impact, including both normal and shear components. Parameters capturing their amenability to break either catastrophically or only undergoing surface breakage were estimated from data and the model has been validated on the basis of data from different sequences of impacts, also being used to predict the phenomenon of stabilization. (C) 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.