They say in space no one can hear you scream. But this is what it sounds like when a bit of space comes to us. Yes, that was the moment last month that 15 tonnes of meteorite exploded over eastern Russia. The people of Chelyabinsk were understandably in shock as windows across the city smashed causing hundreds of injuries. It also sparked something of a treasure hunt since then, as local collectors scour for fragments of the biggest meteorite to hit our planet in more than a century.
"I was walking down the road and I found this - at a depth of about 25 or 30 centimetres buried in the snow was this chunk of meteorite. It's great to have. You can bet it will excite people's imaginations for another hundred years. "
Well, pieces of the meteorite have already begun fetching thousands of dollars online, but the real value of other space rocks may be much greater still. One near-Earth asteroid that's a meteorite that hasn't entered our atmosphere was recently valued at some $200 billion in terms of its precious mineral content. Sniffing a potential gold rush, top names in Silicon Valley, Google executives Larry Page and Eric Schmidt among them, have given their personal funding to companies aiming to exploit these resources.
