The biggest commercially available piece of the celestial body that blew up over the Urals city of Chelyabinsk in mid-February went on sale this week for a modest but firm price of 2.1 million rubles ($65,000).
The charred heavenly stone, offered on the classified ads site Avito.ru with the slogan "a serious meteorite for serious people," weighs 3.36 kilograms (7.4 pounds). It was certified by the Chelyabinsk State University to be, indeed, a meteorite shard and not just a lump of earthly dirt.
The owner, Alexei Usenkov, embarked on a search expedition in the meteorite's wake, personally discovering this and dozens of other, smaller meteorite chunks, which he distributed to friends and relations, local news website 1obl.ru said.
Usenkov wanted to keep his biggest find or hand it over to a museum, but caved in after learning that the ongoing operation to fish out other chunks of the Chelyabinsk meteorite from the local Lake Chebarkul in the Urals is about to yield space rocks bigger than his.
"I think it may serve as a symbol for some Chelyabinsk mall," Usenkov said.
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