The so-called "meteorite rush" has begun around the city of Chelyabinsk, where people have been searching in the snow and ice for chunks of the meteor that hit Russia last week. NBC's Stephanie Gosk reports.
By Alissa de Carbonnel, Reuters
MOSCOW ??A meteor that exploded over Russia's Ural Mountains and sent fireballs blazing to Earth has set off a rush to find fragments of the space rock which hunters hope could fetch thousands of dollars apiece.
Friday's blast and the shock wave that followed shattered windows, injured almost 1,200 people and caused about $33 million worth of damage, said local authorities.
It also started a "meteorite rush" around the industrial city of Chelyabinsk, 950 miles (1,500 kilometers) east of Moscow, where groups of people have started combing through the snow and ice. One amateur space enthusiast estimated that chunks could be worth anything up to 66,000 rubles ($2,200) per gram ??more than 40 times the current cost of gold.
"The price is hard to say yet . ... The fewer meteorites that are recovered, the higher their price," said Dmitry Kachkalin, a member of the Russian Society of Amateur Meteorite Lovers. Meteorites are parts of a meteor that have fallen to Earth.
Scientists at the Urals Federal University were the first to announce a significant find: 53 small, stony, black objects around Lake Chebarkul, near Chelyabinsk, which tests confirmed were small meteorites. The fragments were only 0.5 to 1 centimeter (0.2 to 0.4 inches) across, but the scientists said larger pieces may have crashed into the lake, where a crater in the ice about 8 meters (26 feet) wide opened up after Friday's explosion.
"We just completed tests, and confirm that the pieces of matter found by our experts around Lake Chebarkul are really meteorites," Viktor Grokhovsky, a scientist with the Urals Federal University and the Russian Academy of Sciences, told the RIA news agency. "These are classified as ordinary chondrites, or stony meteorites, with an iron content of about 10 percent."
He did not say whether the fragments had told his team anything about the origins of the meteor, which NASA estimated was 55 feet (17 meters) across before entering Earth's atmosphere and weighed about 10,000 tons.
Alexander Khlopotov / Urals Federal University Press Service via AP
A researcher examines pieces of a meteorite in a laboratory on Monday in Yekaterinburg, Russia.
Alexander Khlopotov / Urals Federal University Press Service via AP
Pieces of a meteorite are seen in a Russian laboratory on Monday. Fifty-three pieces have been brought for analysis to the Urals Federal University in Yekaterinburg. The largest one is one centimeter (a half-inch) in diameter, the smallest is about one millimeter.
The main fireball streaked across the sky at a speed of about 30 kilometers (19 miles) per second before crashing into the snowy wastes, according to Roscosmos, Russia's space agency.
More than 20,000 people took part in search and cleanup operations over the weekend in and around Chelyabinsk, which is in the heart of a region packed with industrial military plants. Many other people were in the area just hoping to find a meteorite, after what was described by scientists as a once-in-a-century event.
Residents of a village near Chelyabinsk searched the snowy streets, collecting stones they hoped would prove to be the real thing. But not all were ready to sell.
"I will keep it. Why sell it? I didn't have a rich lifestyle before, so why start now?" a woman in a pink woolen hat and winter jacket told state television Rossiya-24 as she clutched a small black pebble.
The Internet filled quickly with advertisements from eager hunters hoping to sell what they said were meteorites ??some for as little as 1,000 rubles ($33.18).
The authenticity of the items was hard to ascertain. One seller of a large, silver-hued rock wrote in an advertisement on the portal Avito.ru: "Selling an unusual rock. It may be a piece of meteorite, it may be a bit of a UFO, it may be a piece of a rocket!"
More about the Russian meteor:
Reuters' Ludmila Danilova and Gabriela Baczinska contributed to this report.
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