That space rock that blew up over the Urals (and was captured on a few different cameras)… well, BBC reports that they’ve just hauled a 5-foot-long fragment out of Russia’s Lake Chebarkul:
Live footage showed a team pull out a 1.5-metre-long (five-foot-long) rock from the lake after first wrapping it in a special covering and placing it on a metal sheet while it was still underwater.
The fragment was then pulled ashore and placed on top of a scale for weighing, an operation that quickly went wrong.
The rock broke up into at least three large pieces as it was lifted from the ground with the help of levers and ropes.
Then the scale itself broke, the moment it hit the 570kg (1,255lb) mark.
…
Sergey Zamozdra, an associate professor at Chelyabinsk State University, told the Interfax news agency: “The preliminary examination… shows that this is really a fraction of the Chelyabinsk meteorite.
“This chunk is most probably one of the top 10 biggest meteorite fragments ever found.”
The divers’ mission had been hampered by a number of factors. The rock fragment lay at 13m depth, not 6m or 8m as was originally thought.
Really big, pretty deep.