Will Asteroid Tracking Kill Meteorite Hunting?

Geoff Notkin stands in front of a crowd of people gathered at New York City’s Explorers Club, holding a golf ball-sized chunk of rock in his hands. It’s not just any rock. This rock, he explains, is a chunk of the meteor that struck Chelyabinsk, Russia, in February at a speed of more than 41,000 mph.

Notkin is a meteorite hunter. His travels have taken him to Argentina, the Atacama Desert, Australia, Poland, the Arctic. He’s a lover of science and space, but he’s also got a business. Notkin sells meteorites like the one he’s showing off at the Explorers Club to space enthusiasts at prices that reach a couple bucks a gram, depending on their composition and rarity. Considering how many meteorites are made up of dense iron, even tiny chunks can cost more than $1,000.

Since mankind decided to care about finding and displaying this sort of thing, meteorite hunting has been kind of like finding any other kind of buried treasure. Hunters like Notkin had to rely on local accounts of where craters were, use metal detectors, and a bit of ingenuity to find meteorites.

With Chelyabinsk, that way of hunting could soon be a thing of the past. Though completely unexpected by astronomers, there are thousands of videos of the meteor striking Earth. That’s because in-car dashboard cameras are popular—almost necessary—in Russia to avoid insurance fraud. Suddenly, thousands of unknowing filmmakers had documented the meteor strike in better detail than any other in human history.

“It was the largest event in the last 60 years,” Notkin said. “Besides that, it’s the most well-documented meteorite fall in the history of the world. Not the biggest, but the most well-documented.”

Suddenly, instead of having to make a series of educated guesses to find parts of the meteorite, hunters like Notkin were able to simply use video evidence to determine where chunks of the rock may have gone. Earlier this month, Russian divers found what they believe to be the largest piece of Chelyabinsk, a 1,200 pound chunk of the meteor that sunk to the bottom of nearby Chebarkul Lake.

Chelyabinsk’s unexpectedness has also started a chain reaction of events around the world. On that day, NASA was live streaming footage of DA 14, an asteroid with a diameter of 150 feet that passed within 17,200 miles of Earth. In the weeks and days leading up to it, NASA said the DA 14 flyby was the “closest-ever predicted approach to Earth for an object this large.” Notkin said the Chelyabinsk meteor, which injured more than 1,000 people due to the shockwave (which shattered glass all around it) it sent out when it hit, was likely “small car sized.”

The expected near-miss and the unexpected strike got governments worldwide thinking about asteroid defense and detection.

Texas Rep. Lamar Smith said that asteroid detection is “critical to our future” and that NASA should “continue to invest in systems that identify threatening asteroids.” Last week, the United Nations announced a plan to establish an “International Asteroid Warning Group,” and an independent group called the B612 Foundation plans to launch Sentinel, a space telescope dedicated to “find millions of unmapped asteroids.” Its backers include former astronauts, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Reddit execs, and, for whatever reason, Brian May of Queen.

The old way of finding meteorites isn’t going to last for long. In 2011, Richard Kowalski of Arizona’s Catalina Sky Survey, tracked an asteroid fragment from space and correctly predicted where it would eventually hit, in Sudan.

“It was the first time in our history we saw an incoming body and predicted its trajectory and landing point,” Notkin said. “We’re going to be doing more of that.”

It may not seem like the biggest problem in the world—surely it’s beneficial to know when and where an asteroid is going to hit Earth, but meteorite hunting is quickly becoming big business. Notkin’s Meteorite Men television show, which followed him and his partner Steve Arnold, aired for three seasons on the Science Channel. Notkin’s “Club Space Rock” meteorite hunting club has more than 3,000 members, and many governments worldwide have enacted laws that prohibit hunters from removing meteorites from their countries.

Notkin recalls a “gold rush” that happened after a hunter discovered meteorite fragments near Whitecourt in Alberta, Canada.

“This amazing crater was 1,100 years old and full of meteorite fragments. It was cordoned off by the government with a sign that says ‘$50,000 fine for illegally removing meteorites,’ and people were sneaking in and doing it anyways,” he said. “When that happens, that [scientific] data is lost forever.”

Whether new meteor tracking data is shared with the public will likely be the deciding factor in whether meteorite hunting is fundamentally changed in the future. So far, humanity has been incredibly lucky—no one has been killed by a meteor impact. But if the plan is to protect the public with this tracking data, it’ll be hard to keep news of an incoming meteor private.

“I think this will change the way meteorites will be collected,” Notkin said. “So you’re opening a really fascinating subject, and that is: Who’s going to get there first? Will it be researchers? Meteor collectors? The curious?”