UK Man Earns $64,000 After Quitting Job to Find Fragments of Meteorite

The celestial body landed on Earth last February, sparking a major hunt among amateur astronomers as well as people among the detectorist community who are keen to bag a windfall. The meteorite is extremely rare, there being only 51 samples of it in collections on Earth.

Those who never take a risk never drink champagne, as the Russian saying goes. It seems this is true for Chris Casey, who quit his job as a carpenter to search for fragments of meteorite. Speaking to British daily The Sun, the 34-year-old revealed that his daring action was rewarded generously, although he admits that the work was exhausting.

Casey says he spent three weeks in sub-zero temperatures, walking 40,000 steps each in day in search of pieces of meteorite, which managed to survive a fiery trip through Earth’s atmosphere.

“You are talking about less than a bag of sugar spread over 10 miles, so it was a real mind game. The search probably cost me £10,000 ($13,000) in costs and lost earnings,” he said.

Casey then discovered a piece a 12g piece, which he sold to a private collector on eBay for $22,000. He then found two more fragments, which were sold at Christie’s online auction for $42,000 earlier this week. The amateur astronomer says he has two more fragments of the meteorite, weighing 7.2 grams and 5 grams, but he decided to keep them.

The celestial body, which landed in the small market town Winchcombe, England is extremely rare. It belongs to a carbonaceous chondrite type of meteorites. It has a chemical composition that is close to that of the solar nebula from where our Solar System appeared.

There are about 65,000 meteorites in collections around the world and only 51 of them are of the carbonaceous chondrite type. Researchers say studies of the meteorite will give them insight into what our Solar System was like before planets were there.