Update on the Russian meteor (and subsequent meteorites)

Remember the asteroid/meteor that exploded over Russia early this year?  Well, they've done some analyses of some small pieces of it -- and guess what, it's a space rock.  Actually, a chondrite. 


Russian Chelyabinsk meteorite pieces go under microscope

In other Russian meteorite news, if you remember that they found a big round hole in a lake under the big boom, the performance of a bottom survey found an apparent much bigger piece of the rock.  But they haven't brought it up yet.

Huge chunk of meteorite located in Urals lake

 Also, apparently it wasn't hard to find pieces of this rock in the snow:

Chelyabinsk mega-meteor:  Status Report
[This article, by the way, says that they don't know if what's on the bottom of the lake is a piece of the meteor body at all, and it's covered with silt.)

"Meanwhile, even simple Russian peasants quickly realized that rocks falling from outer space are worth plenty of rubles. Although deep snow covered the region at the time, winter's blanket actually made finding fragments relatively easy. Eager searchers simply looked for small, deep tunnels in the drifts. A few seconds digging by hand down into the snow frequently revealed a piece of stone. Some holes became partly filled with icy particles that adhered to the meteorite and sintered together into relatively hard cylinders, yielding the weird cosmic snow cones like those seen at right."

So, they've found little pieces of the space rock and it was definitely a space rock.  But the big find might still be on the bottom of the lake.   Considering how much money it would be worth, I expect some entrepeneur to go fishing for it eventually.