[meteorite-list] Feeling lucky? Tape a magnet to the bottom of a camel.

From: Darren Garrison <cynapse_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu Jun 22 09:48:44 2006
Message-ID: <6v7l925qvnfdtcc8aubk30lvg71vvnvjtm_at_4ax.com>

At least, according to this article.


http://www.ocregister.com/ocregister/homepage/abox/article_1189656.php

Thursday, June 22, 2006

He owns his piece of the sky
Collectors of meteorites pay astronomical sums to lay hands on these unearthly
treasures.

By TOM BERG
The Orange County Register

GARDEN GROVE ? Something lit up the Norwegian sky on June 7. A streaking
fireball. Caught on film. Followed by an earth-shaking impact recorded at the
Karasjok seismic lab at 2:13:25 a.m.

It became international news when University of Oslo astronomer Knut Jorgen Roed
Odegaard told a local newspaper: "If the meteorite was as large as it seems to
have been, we can compare it to the Hiroshima bomb."

Those words assured that Norway's meteor would light up more than the heavens.
It lit up the faces of a rare new breed - meteorite hunters who scour the globe
for space treasure worth as much as $25,000 a gram - and the collectors who fund
such expeditions. Collectors like Dave Radosevich.

In just eight years, Radosevich, 42, of Garden Grove has amassed more than 300
meteorites - including pieces of the moon and Mars and a rock older than our
very solar system - making his one of the best private collections anywhere.

He hates reading. Took shop in high school. Dropped out of college. Yet the
Northrop Grumman project manager quotes Kepler and Einstein. He builds massive
telescopes for universities in his spare time. And just ask him about his
Allende. His Murchison. Or his Cape York.

THE LIGHT

How to speak meteorite: Say, "I've got a 40-pound Campoover there." Or, "You
know that Marjalahti I showed you?" or "The smoke trail from that Sikhote lasted
six hours in the sky."

You refer to your rock as the place it was found, usually the name of the
closest post office. Truly.

"Allende is older than any Earth rock," Radosevich says, picking up a 1-pound
meteorite found in Allende, Mexico. "It's older than the sun. The planets. Older
than any of the solar system. You're holding a piece of a star."

That would make it more than 4.5 billion years old, the estimated age of our
solar system. Most meteorites hail from the Asteroid Belt beyond Mars. But
Allende is believed to come from deeper space.

"I've had people 70 years old hold a meteorite for the first time and say, 'I've
never in my entire life held something so interesting,'" he says. "And you can
just see the lights come on."

Each rock carries a story. Radosevich pulls a Diablo Canyon from his display
case. A small chunk of iron now. But 50,000 years ago, it was part of a meteor
that slammed Arizona like 150 Hiroshima bombs, blasting a 700-foot crater nearly
a mile across.

His Cape York, from Greenland, holds delicate iron crystals that can only be
formed after two planets collide, leaving the molten core of one planet to cool
at the almost incomprehensible rate of one degree per million years.

Then he pulls out his Murchison, from Australia - another meteorite from outside
our solar system. It was found to have 56 amino acids - 33 of which had not been
seen before on Earth - when found in 1969.

"It's the most significant meteorite to fall and be analyzed on Earth because it
contains the building blocks of life," he says. "It's there. It's all there. And
it's about as extraterrestrial as you can get."

GOLD RUSH

Feeling lucky? Forget the lottery. Go buy yourself a magnet and tape it to the
bottom of a cane. Or a tractor. Or a camel.

And, by the way, welcome to the new Gold Rush.

Sunland's Bob Verish became rich while cleaning his back yard of rats' nests and
found two Mars meteorites in a pile of rocks he'd collected 19 years earlier.

Businessman Steve Arnold became famous last year after paying Kansas farmers to
comb the fields of a famous meteorite fall and unearthing a 1,400-pound
meteorite filled with iron, nickel and green olivine crystals. You can buy it
for $1 million. Or see it at Haviland's first annual meteorite festival July 8.

Fifteen years ago - before eBay, before Google, before the rise of the Internet
- few cared about meteorites. Few knewabout them. You could buy just about
anything for a buck a pound from all of three or four dealers worldwide.

There was no convenient way to advertise meteorites, to research or buy them.
You couldn't exactly look up "meteorites" in the Yellow Pages.

"If I'd started back then, I'd be rich," Radosevich says. "Nobody was
collecting. Even the rare ones, nobody cared."

The Internet changed everything. Suddenly a handful of entrepreneurial treasure
hunters began studying the best places to search. They fanned out across the
globe, paying camel drivers in the Sahara Desert, crop pickers in South Africa,
and children in Mexico to search for heavy, fusion-crusted rocks near known
meteorite falls.

Others began inspecting suburban rain gutters, four- wheeling through California
dry lakebeds, and walking along New England rock walls with magnet-mounted canes
- most meteorites have enough iron to attract a magnet.

The prices now? Try $1,000 a gram for moon rock. And $2,000 a gram for Mars rock
- 100 times the price of gold. Some rare moon meteorites command $25,000 a gram.

Which is why new rocks arrive every day in the mailbox of UCLA research
geochemist Alan Rubin, who inspects and authenticates meteorites for the public.
Maybe one a year is a meteorite. The rest?

Says Rubin, "We call them 'meteorwrongs.'"

UNOBTAINIUM

Norway's streaking fireball, it turns out, was greatly exaggerated. The
Norwegian astronomer apologized, and word is, a meteorite hunter may have found
a 60-pound rock - certainly no Hiroshima. What would that take?

First know this: In meteor circles, "fireball" doesn't always equal "gigantic."
A meteor the size of a grain of sand can be seen as a shooting star because of
the energy released as it splits the earth's atmosphere, Radosevich says.

One the size of a pencil eraser can be seen to have flames. Basketball-size? A
good light show. House-size? Several city blocks gone. Half-Dome-size? A city of
5 million vaporized.

Although meteors enter Earth's atmosphere every day, most entirely burn up.
Maybe 500 land each year and only one or two of those are found. That worries
Marvin Killgore of Tucson, Ariz., who's hunted meteorites in 45 countries.

"We're picking them up a lot faster than they're falling," he says. "In a few
decades, they're going to be all picked up and collected."

Of course, that's what makes them rare. And desirable. Like the meteorite found
on Thiel Mountain, Antarctica, before the U.S. banned collecting there. For
Radosevich, it's the Holy Grail: Limited supply. Only two known private
collectors. $1,000 a gram.

"I call it 'unobtainium,'" he says.

In the meantime, he'll wait for more news from Norway.

"There are probably eight to 10 people over there right now looking for it,"
Radosevich says. "When they find it, I'll be right here, eagerly awaiting to buy
it."

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Received on Thu 22 Jun 2006 09:51:13 AM PDT