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China's meteorite hunters: The adventurers hoping to get rich from rocks 9/9/2019
It is rare to find Zhang Bo without a metal detector, map and off-road vehicle.Based in Shanghai, the self-funded meteorite-hunter spends his days researching meteor sightings and traveling the world to search for elusive -- and valuable -- fragments of rock.To get more chinese news site, you can visit shine news official website.
Zhang, 37, is remarkably successful for someone with no formal training. He started researching meteorites after seeing a fireball streak across the sky in southern China in 2009.
In 2012, he began mounting expeditions into some of the world's most inhospitable areas in Russia, France, the Sahara Desert and in China's far-west Xinjiang, armed with a metal detector to scan the ground for rocks.
Since then, Zhang has plotted the location of meteorite landing sites. That, he says, has helped the Chinese authorities determine that the world's biggest meteor field, which is 425 kilometers long, is in Altay, in China's far-western Xinjiang region.China's vast plains and mountainous regions are popular hunting grounds for the nation's meteorite enthusiasts. Some of the world's biggest iron meteorites have been found there, including in Altay where Zhang competes with other hunters to find precious rocks.

Part of the appeal is the sense of adventure. Accessing remote areas requires serious equipment and planning -- and with it comes the thrill of possibly finding something that pushes forward science's understanding of the solar system.
For example, scientists found organic matter associated with water -- the origin of life -- in the "Zag and Monahans" meteors which crashed into Texas and Morocco in 1998, raising the possibility of the existence of complex organic compounds in space. For many meteor hunters, however, the motivation is much more basic: Money.
After a fireball was seen soaring across the sky near the border of Myanmar and Laos in 2018, meteorite hunters raced to the region, armed with their metal detectors and hopes of striking it rich.
Confirmation that about 200 meteorites had rained down on a small village in Menghai country, Xishuangbanna, in China, which borders the two Asian countries, promoted such a rush that local authorities issued a notice calling for calm.
"Please take a rational look at the fall of the meteorite. Do not blindly want to achieve the goal of getting rich overnight by finding a meteorite. Good life needs to be created by your own efforts and dedication. Please treat it rationally," the government notice said. Days after the fireball sighting, alleged meteorites were being advertised online for as much as 50,000 RMB ($7,800) a gram.
Xu Weibiao, a meteorite expert from the Purple Mountain Observatory (PMO) in Nanjing, says meteorites can sell for even more than that -- above $10,000 per gram.
"The rareness of the meteorite decides its market value," Xu says. "Except those people who really know meteorite and its importance, most buyers are ordinary people and their meteorites are fake." According to NASA, about 44 tonnes of meteoritic material falls on Earth each day. Most burns up in the atmosphere, but some survive the fall and land in bizarre places. In late July, for example, a suspected meteorite about the same size as a football landed in a rice field in eastern India.
There are no confirmed cases of meteors killing humans but the International Comet Quarterly tracks near misses, and lists many occasions when meteorites have hit homes or cars.He was on vacation biking around the resort Chinese island of Hainan when he spotted a ball of fire grazing the night sky that was seen from the capital, Sanya, to the Paracel Islands in the South China Sea.

Zhang started studying. First on the internet and in libraries, then by knocking on the door of the Purple Mountain Observatory (PMO) in Nanjing, 300 kilometers east of Shanghai.
Founded as the former Institute of Astronomy in 1928, today the PMO is the hub of China's space object research, where experts, like Xu, examine meteorites that hunters, like Zhang, bring in for verification. At first, Zhang brought them the meteorites he had bought or found for testing.

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