Seeing a meteorite explode in the sky above your head is a once-in-a-lifetime event.
Getting 25,000 big ones to lay hands on it is also, equally, once-in-a-lifetime:
A rare fireball was spotted streaking across the northern Maine sky in broad daylight last week. Experts hoping to study the meteorite are now offering a financial reward to anyone who can recover a piece of it.
The American Meteor Society said it received multiple accounts of the fireball as it burned its way across the Maine sky. (This is cool — the AMS even has a map to track eyewitness reports.)
NASA was able to pinpoint the rough areas in which the chunks of the meteor may have landed. Smaller pieces may have blown across into Canada; larger ones will still be on the U.S. side of the border.
And the Maine Mineral and Gem Museum very much wants folks to go out looking for it. To that end the museum offering $25,000 for "the first 1 kilogram of meteorite found." That's a very good conversion rate: About two pounds of space rock for $25k.
Whether or not the institution will actually get any bits of rock is uncertain. They made a similar offer back in 2016 and yet nobody was able to produce a fragment.
Still, the museum is certain that the material is out there, just ripe for the picking:
"The existence of positive Doppler radar returns — meteorites detected descending through the atmosphere just several miles above ground — assures us there are meteorites waiting to be found."
