The Great Meteorite Hunt: Museum Offers $25,000 Reward for Rare Fireball Remains in Maine

Meteorite hunters, it’s time to sharpen your skills and venture into the wilderness of Maine. The Maine Mineral & Gem Museum is offering a generous $25,000 reward for the remains of a space rock that streaked across the sky last week, captivating witnesses and causing a sonic boom. The fireball was visible in broad daylight before landing near the border between the United States and Canada, a rare and significant event.

According to waaytv.com, NASA’s Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science (ARES) Lab detected the fireball on radar and was able to calculate the “strewn field”— the area where fragments of the meteor might be found — near Calais, Maine. Darryl Pitt, head of the meteorite division at the Maine Mineral & Gem Museum, is eager to study any fragments of the meteorite. Depending on the type of meteorite, it could provide valuable information about the origins of the solar system.

The museum’s $25,000 reward is reserved for the first meteorite piece found weighing at least 2.2 pounds (1 kilogram). However, Pitt emphasized that the museum would be willing to pay for any specimen “irrespective of its size.” The search for meteorites in the wooded environment of Maine is no simple task. “It’s a sparsely populated area but not as sparsely populated as where most meteorites fall — the ocean,” Pitt said.

Remarkably, only eight to 10 meteorites are recovered worldwide each year, out of the hundreds of fireballs seen falling to Earth. In 2021, a meteorite that fell on a driveway in the United Kingdom turned out to be an extremely rare type of space rock, and is now part of the Natural History Museum in London.

The Maine meteorite was visible for an impressive four minutes from around 11:57 a.m. ET on Saturday, April 8, according to NASA. The agency noted that winds might have carried smaller meteorites across the border into Canada. “For the light (of the fireball) to overwhelm the brightness of the day, it was a significant event,” Pitt said.

Prospective meteorite hunters should keep an eye out for rocks that look different from their surroundings. The outside of a meteorite would likely be blackened after being toasted by the heat as it plummeted through Earth’s atmosphere, while the inside would likely be a different color. It may also contain iron and therefore be attracted to a magnet.

The museum has offered a reward for a meteorite once before, following a meteor that lit up the sky in the region in 2016. However, the search was not fruitful. This time, Pitt said he is “guardedly optimistic” because more detailed information is available from radar data, and he expects a “robust response” from meteorite hunters.

As meteorite enthusiasts comb the woods of Maine in search of this celestial treasure, the scientific community eagerly awaits the potential insights that these fragments may reveal about the origins of our solar system.