Meteorites could be worth big bucks

As Russia assesses the damage from the meteorite shower that rained down on the central region of the country Friday, experts in the US said the fragments of space rock could bring a small fortune in hidden treasure to those quick enough to find and scoop them up.

“A relatively small piece is worth maybe a few hundred dollars, but a large chunk can be up to $100,000 or even more,” said Joseph Gutheinz, a specialist on meteorites and a former senior special agent with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), in an interview with RIA Novosti.

“We literally have meteor shows here in the US on a regular basis,” he added.

As for the meteorite fragments that landed in central Russia Friday morning injuring hundreds of people and damaging thousands of buildings, Gutheinz said, “I expect people to be out there with metal detectors all over the place. They might even come in from Moscow to search.” The catch is to find the right chunk of rock.

Size matters, but the value of a meteorite is also based on its rarity, where it came from and what it’s made of.

In 1998, as a special agent with NASA, Gutheinz led an undercover sting operation that was designed to catch people selling phony moon rocks. Instead, Operation Lunar Eclipse led him to a man who had a real moon rock and an asking price of $5 million.

It was traced to the Apollo 17 mission to the moon, and was given as a goodwill gift from then-US President Richard Nixon to Honduras. It was eventually returned to the government of Honduras.

Before someone buys a meteorite, Gutheinz said, a geologist should make a very definitive assessment based on evidence of extreme heat, weight, composition and other factors.

In the United States, Gutheinz added, “most meteorites are found in plowed fields or desert environments, all across the farm belt and the prairies in plowed land, and in Death Valley they’re found a lot because it’s dry so you don’t have the decay factor and they stand out against the background.”