Meteorite Men | Chile 1: Imilac & Vaca Muerta | Full HD Episodes

steve arnold and jeff notkin are modern day treasure hunters they're calling to me i've got meteorites in my bones you know they travel the world in search of meteorites alien invaders that have been crashing into our planet for the last four and a half billion years on this adventure the guys head to one of the harshest places on earth spectacular chile's atacama desert jeff and steve were here 13 years ago on their first expedition as a meteorite hunting team chile is a meteorite rich country and that's why they're back is this grave robbing yes the guys braved below freezing temperatures above 9000 feet it's not just the rocks it's everything about them to find the big space rocks they missed on their last chile hunt yeah if that's not a meteorite what is it it's worth 25 000 easy just another day in the life of a meteorite hunter chile is a strikingly beautiful country it's full of amazing scenery this is my second time in chile i was here 13 years ago with steve so happy to be back does the restaurant serve lamb chops here but the thing that draws us to chile is it is a meteorite rich country there are numerous fantastic meteorite sites onward and upward and we're gonna try and hit every one of them on this trip nothing's gonna stand in our way the atacama desert in northern chile is renowned as one of the most desolate arid and dangerous places on the planet measuring less than five millimeters of rainfall each year this might not be the end of the world but you can see it from here there is nothing anywhere this barren landscape is where the mars rover was tested before nasa sent it to the real red planet it really is the wild frontier the first location the guys will hunt is the immilak strewn field located 873 miles north of chile's capital santiago because immilak is a four hour drive from the nearest city jeff and steve will camp during the four-day hunt despite the dangers of exposure to the harsh elements this is about as far away as you can get and still be somewhere [Music] it's winter in the southern hemisphere and temperatures often drop below freezing in addition to the bitter cold the guys will also contend with altitude they'll hunt and camp at nearly 10 000 feet where the oxygen is dangerously thin jeff and steve make their way to the meteorite rich imalax strewn field hey milac we're back did you miss us it is great to be back to milac again it looks almost exactly the same on their first hunt 13 years ago the guys on earth several kilograms of small meteorites worth about 10 000 so many fond memories and of course how can you not have fond memories when you find hundreds of little meteorites uh it's a time of our life to be able to be back here to hunt in a ground that has proven for us in the past we're hoping it's going to prove again so 13 years ago our campsite was right down there yeah we did a really good job on our first trip and we know other people have been out hunting in the intervening years so we're curious to see what if anything remains i remember making a comment leaving that this is the one place on earth where anybody could show up and within five minutes they could find a meteorite you want to put that to the test i think we should uh have a race to see who can find the first piece okay three two one and they're off [Music] the history of the imalax stream field dates back to 1822 when prospectors looking for silver stumbled across several large masses of meteorites since that time several tons of material had been found the guys are here to find the big rocks they overlooked before but a lot of smaller rocks could turn out to be just as valuable i got one three minutes and 40 seconds i got one i beat you barely i think i detected mine first doesn't count i bet mine's bigger than yours the gold standard here would be a meteorite that has a nice juicy green crystals in it that super ultimate meteorite that we hope to find here well let's see what we got here are our first few tiny little pieces and i mean tiny but they're meteorites the imalac meteorite is classified as a palestine a rare stony iron containing mixtures of both metal and olivine crystals the largest known imalac recovered to date is currently housed in the british museum of natural history in london and weighed in at 198 kilograms the value of these rocks is determined by aesthetics usually clarity of crystals weight and mass i don't think there's anywhere else in the world you could get out of your truck and find meteorites in five minutes they're really small though it's a cute little one about a gram ah probably worth eight or ten bucks at this rate steve and jeff will need to find a thousand of these one gram pieces to cover the cost of this expedition little black one my detector is picking up even smaller pieces call them canardly's can hardly see them when meteorites plummet to earth the area where they land is called the strewn field as it fragments into multiple pieces typically the small pieces fall first and the bigger ones go further because they've got more mass and inertia it carries them that extra bit of distance for decades the imalax strewn field was widely believed to have a northeast to southwest trajectory with the large end of the strewn field toward the southwest but the small fragments the guys are finding indicate a different possibility a large piece of the meteorite may have experienced a violent breakup late in its flight suggesting an opposite trajectory with larger pieces landing right where the guys are hunting here in the imlac strewn field everything from very little subgram size pieces of meteorites have been found up to 450 pound masses have been found these pieces broke up in the atmosphere at a considerable altitude and were then spread over these hundreds of acres here the immilak stroonfield is more than three square miles roughly the size of 1400 football fields a lot of ground to cover when you're looking for something that is oftentimes the size of a pebble oh there it is little guy all metal detectors basically work on the same principle they send a signal from the control box down through a cable to a coil and the coil then transmits that signal into the ground if that signal encounters a buried metallic object it'll send a return signal an echo back up into the machine that's broadcast through a speaker it really is a way of looking for invisible buried treasure we use every tool at our disposal now steve and i know that a lot of meteorite hunters have been out to this site you can see footprints and tire tracks all over the place it's very clear that a lot of that area has been thoroughly hunted so the strategy i'm using today is to hunt a little bit outside of the known boundary of the strewn field and see if i can find maybe some pieces that overshot the strewn field a little bit it's a gamble well that sounds nice huh it's right on the surface and sometimes gambling pays off that is a nice little immilac with a big olivine crystal in it imolac meteorites probably go for about seven eight ten dollars a gram this piece is about 10 or 12 grams so 70 80 100 bucks if i was gonna sell it i think i'll keep it make it into a pendant for my sweetheart we'll see about that sometimes the meteorite hunt can feel like it's barely worth the effort oh it's tiny ten bucks cat food for a week nice five six seven bucks i guess jeff and i didn't walk by this spot 13 years ago or we would have picked up these three they're my newt oh it's a piece of a bullet ah there's not supposed to be these kind of meteorongs out here i got a real nice signal here really just that little guy but jeff and steve know even the little finds add up ooh getting a little bigger 10 rock we're finding a few small pieces little little pieces so far but uh at least they're the real deal that's actually the biggest one i found today which isn't really saying much but at least they're out here it's just a question of how much stamina have we got to climb up and down these mountains at 10 000 feet all day i agree at this altitude the air is so thin i find myself puffing and puffing every time i go up one of the hills well that sounds pretty good yeah and that's all it is here hiking up and down the hills with the detector trying to find something it's right on top of the ground too you jealous yes steve i'm gonna run all the way up there to see it all right let's find some more of these rocks this is a good example of skeletal imalax the imalaq meteorite's a palestine which means it's roughly 50 olivine crystals and out here in this harsh desert environment the olivine weathers away more quickly than the iron leaving fantastic scary sharp shapes and we call them imalex skeletons so that's cute bit by bit the collection grows doing fairly well actually oh yeah nice one oh and it's got a hole in it there's always collectors out there that go after unusual things and one of the things that's desirable are meteorites with natural holes in them so this guy is probably a 40 little meteorite maybe 50 dollars sounds good well that sounds pretty good whoa wow this is why we come out here this little guy got points of metal sticking around there's remnants of old crystals old olivine crystals this is so cool looking there's little holes all over in it from where the crystals burned out and yet the lattice work of of metal almost a swiss cheese matrix of metal holding all these crystals when the crystals go away leaves little gaps and caverns and this one just has multiple holes in it somebody including jeff and myself did not cover this part of the this hill very good because this is one that should not have been missed it's big enough it still has some olivine crystals it just has a little bit of everything we're looking for this meteorite weighs about 10 grams at 10 gram that's 100 rock but it is so cute there's a premium on it so i'd say 200 maybe 250 the guys have found a total of 14 small imilac meteorites worth approximately a thousand dollars not a bad first day i do not want to leave this hillside but the sun is setting and jeff and steve have to find shelter before temperatures plummet check this out wow the guys stumble upon an ideal spot to spend the night it looks like uh something you'd see at a western oh yeah pulls up got a roof over our head maybe this place looks like a cross between a dump and an old train station anyone home oh cool hey we could make a fire in here yeah it's a bit squalid squalid is it let's grab our tent i don't suppose you brought a broom with you did you we're at an elevation of between nine and ten thousand feet here and it's the winter in chile where's the tent at so it's really cold by midnight it should be somewhere between 10 and 20 degrees below freezing this is my camp bed thank you we're throwing it on the floor an expedition like this requires a lot of planning a lot of equipment and it's very expensive all right that means we have to find a decent amount of material just to cover our costs just another day in the life of a meteorite hunter day one did produce rocks but not the big ones jeff and steve had hoped for well we found a few pieces today so we know there's still something here i mean little stuff but it's a little discouraging to tell you we're just gonna have to hit it harder tomorrow all right look outside the box try something new it's what we do i'm excited to get the magnet sled together we'll be able to cover a lot more ground in a real short period of time and um the idea is if we can suck some of those little ones and medium-sized ones up out of the ground onto the magnets then we can cover a lot more ground than we can walking around with 14 small finds already under their belts the guys begin day two optimistic it's a lovely morning it's sunny no clouds in the sky all right so before we head out i thought it'd be worth going over everything that we know so it seems like the distribution of pieces is something like this today they hope to score larger rocks and to do so hunt a different area of the stroom field one thing we might try is going a little bit northwest out of the string field yeah and another thing maybe would be to search on the back of this hillside right if you use your giant magnet sled in this flat area here where you can pull it behind the truck right i'll use my smaller handheld one and i'll try and do some gridding up here hopefully we'll be able to pull some of those remaining ones out of the ground well that seems like a pretty good game plan to me cool the goal is to continue to bag small pieces while also hunting for an undiscovered chunk of meteorite they are convinced remains on the desert floor oh this is great can barely read it give me luck look at all the bullet holes someone's made it out of an old barrel i think i think so did you think that would come off it's what are you thinking it's an abandoned train station no one's going to care right oh no probably not wouldn't this look fantastic behind my bar back home on the wall it's very late probably would actually there's no way this side is not coming home with me you're called not mine [Applause] now and then uh we come across something that's almost as good as a meteorite and when i saw this vintage bullet hole riddled old imalax sign i i just had to have it meteorites aren't the only treasures out here in the atacama i dig it just a little bonus it's a link back to the old days of imilac and maybe rescuing the sign from oblivion will bring us a little bit of luck in the stringfield today thinking positive [Applause] chilean souvenir [Applause] the guys make their way farther north to location number two jeff and steve will hunt where they hope others haven't just outside the stroom fields boundary it's also time to try out some of their newest meteorite hunting gear i am in the process of assembling my modified magnet rake i have an array of strong steel rake teeth attached to a steel chassis and then i'll be attaching a series of extremely powerful rare earth magnets so the idea is i drag this behind me and the teeth here disturb the ground and hopefully dislodge small meteorite fragments that are just slightly buried and then they should adhere to the array of super powerful magnets directly behind that's the theory we'll see if it works hey where's all the extra magnets they're over here steve you know i went to extraordinary lengths hand carrying those magnets all the way from tucson extraordinary lengths to avoid having those blocks stick together which you've managed to do in five minutes they were stuck together before i even touched the box don't even when i inspected the box don't take all of those um what do you mean all of those i've only got four here i need like 20 more yeah well i bought 70. let me peel some off and i'll bring them back you know whatever's best for steve is best for the rest of the world i brought the freaking magnets all the way from the states and now he's stealing them from me seriously how many magnets are you needing i've got four here and two on the truck so i need another 12. so where's the other 30 the other 30 you said you ordered 70. i did what's 48 and 18 i don't know i can't do math well no wonder steve also has some new tricks up his sleeve he's putting his faith in a hand-built magnet sled that he'll pull behind the truck the magnet sled is an eight foot wide board that's going to have a whole row of these super strong rare earth magnets screwed into it we're going to pull it behind the vehicle to make it a little bit easier i'm taking some screws putting them through a 1 by 3 which will allow it to kind of plow the ground make it a little bit easier so when those little amelak meteorites feel the tug of the magnet they can suck right up to it i'm just going to do a little uh test to illustrate the power of these magnets so my rock camera here that's probably about eight pounds here's one magnet so this is nothing for that this would actually hold about an 80 pound piece of iron he said 80 pounds a pull times four 320 pounds you do not want to get your finger in between two of these guys see that's why we wear gloves hurts i was just pulling these magnets apart and two of them slap back together and caught my finger in between it and uh cut me now i'm bleeding and i don't have time for this kids don't try this at home i don't know about you but i got some field testing to do okay you field test i'll be right behind you and here it goes of course i want jeff to find as much as he can i just want to be able to find a little bit more than he can really so far he's got his ideas i've got mine we're gonna see which one plays out to be the best oh there's our first one it's only tiny at least we know it works in principle but working in principle doesn't pay the bills at least not when hunting for space rocks jeff and steve need volume [Music] wow that looks pretty impressive i want to go down and see how this is working out well this seems to be turning up the surface pretty well you can see where you've been yeah that's a fact hey at least we know it'll pick up a big object look at that he picked up a battery that's cool there's one here's one there's one oh look nice oh got a big one all right it's working it works it's kind of like dollars falling out of a slot machine that's more than i got all day yesterday but don't let me discourage you from using your magnet rank i think this is working a little better i didn't hear that i said i think yours is working a little better mine is working a little better than yours well you do have four times as many magnets and a truck there's still more on here it's always fun when you have an idea in your head and you get out in the field and you implement it and score steve i've got an idea uh-huh it's it's so tiring walking up and down the hill at this altitude dragging that thing and we see that it works with the truck what about if i bring mine down and we attach it to the other side of the truck on a shorter cable okay so what we're going to try and do now is combine both of them into one mega magnet rake and tow both of them behind the truck [Music] we've got the two magnet rakes working together they're not getting tangled up they didn't break or fall off the truck i'd have to call it a success let's see what we got oh look at this wow that's more like it [Music] to our surprise we've discovered that the two magnet rakes work extremely well together steve's rake is picking up more meteorites overall but mine's picked up a couple of larger ones look at this look at the size of nice one steve and i work really well together as a team but sometimes i just got to get out on my own and get away from the hubbub and the joking and the nonsense for me there is an element of solitary contemplation in meteorite hunting and i wanted to come out and do a long scout on my own so i decided to bring both my favorite detectors with me and they both serve a different purpose i love having all my gear with me when i'm talking about science so if that if it's not too nerdy this is the fisher f75 it's probably the most powerful and sensitive handheld metal detector available today and it really shines when you're looking for small to medium sized targets that are fairly close to the surface it's extremely sensitive this is the pulse star 2 pro this was designed and built by a friend of ours in germany named thomas bauer and this is a really powerful machine this is designed to see deeper into the ground and look for larger buried targets now we know that the fireball that created the imalax stringfield blasted over our heads probably exploded first behind those mountains and pieces showered down all over this area it was going in that direction so we expect larger pieces to be down at this end the ground's pretty soft it's possible that there are a couple of larger pieces that suck themselves down in a bit deeper and that's what the pulse star is for it's a lot of gear to carry but i probably won't get back to imelec in this lifetime so we use every tool at our disposal beauty oh it's got some nice intact olivine well colorful not intact if we're in an area where we found one or two meteorites we want to make sure that we find any other pieces that are nearby i'm gonna leave a marker flag here so i can see where i've been and where this find was made and now i can grid around this area see if there's anything else nearby gridding's a technique we use for methodically covering every square foot in a particular zone where we think meteorites might be hiding we'll pick a starting point and then we'll go a fixed distance in one direction and then we'll turn around and we'll come back on a parallel course but a few feet over if you've ever watched someone on a lawn mower methodically cutting the grass you'll get the idea as the second day at intellect comes to a close oh there's a big hole in it the guys are eager to tally up their two-day bounty what's our current market value for intellect it's really gone up in recent years because there isn't any more so we've got like 980 grams just a smidge in under a kilo one more like this and we would have seen over a kilo we can't go find them yeah maybe um you know i think seven bucks a gram is gonna be really fair i think we got a seven thousand dollar haul here oh easily i i think seven dollars is conservative it was just a really fantastic experience to go back after all these years and and for their still to be meteorites now we've really cleaned the place really done it no there's still some pieces back there [Music] after two days collecting enough small fragments to cover their trip costs jeff and steve are more determined than ever to find a rare and valuable space rock they abandon the hunt at imolak and drive eight hours south in pursuit of one of the rarest meteorite types the vaca muerta mesocyteorite this type of meteorite is made up of equal parts nickel iron and silicon which indicates a violent beginning the collision of two masses of varying compositions at the time of impact these different materials mixed and later cooled forming a new composite that would eventually cross paths with earth this is where the big end of the strewn field starts just over on the second hill yeah actually a little bit over this way almost four tons of the nearly six ton meteorite have been recovered from this strewn field over the years but now jeff and steve have new intelligence that big rocks potentially worth tens of thousands of dollars are still here but when they stop to get their bearings jeff and steve realize they aren't exactly sure where here is i was very excited to get here to get down to it start hunting and uh this morning he seemed a bit lost something's wrong confused so it's on that hill i don't think so i discovered that in fact steve forgot to bring the streamfield map that he laboriously created it's straight north a little bit more that way not on this hill but a little bit more to our west i think 51.5 west are you sure it's not 70 23 yeah he's a bit of an absent-minded scientist lunatic type really oh so we've got a couple options here we can uh drive around and look we can walk around and look we're trying to get our bearings figuring out where we're going to start it's a big strewn field we only have a little bit of time here so we got to make the most of it we want to check out the old workings the mine workings we're going to have to start that square one and recreate all the data ourselves by going and finding the impact pits and then extrapolating backwards try and find out where we're actually supposed to be we've decided we're going to get over to the one site where some miners had processed broken down some meteorites back in the 1800s thinking it was silver if jeff and steve can find the impact pit at the large end of the stream field they can use that fixed point to orient themselves and find the small end of the stroom field steve and jeff begin the search for the impact pit but finding the site will be difficult and time consuming they decide to stop to build a pvc metal detector so they can hunt for new meteorites while they search for the landmark impact pit do you know where our bag of pvc pipe pieces are please tell me it's in here jeff the pvc detector is designed to cover large areas in a short time crap crap crap and could yield a large buried nickel iron rich mass well we have lost some pvc pipes but today just isn't their day possibly bounce down on the road somewhere so um we're looking here at what it would take to build the handheld version of this so i didn't suppose you have any pvc glue do you yes i do you sure about that no i'm not sure well i'm sure i have some all right well you seem to be occupied so i'm gonna poodle around for a bit in the truck see if i can find that you're gonna what poodle around in the truck yeah it's an english expression how does one poodle it means uh drive very legit leisurely leisurely okay you go drive leisurely all right i'll come back in a bit it doesn't look like you're going anywhere this is the pulse star pulse induction metal detector and this is the brains of it it connects to the wire and the wire goes to the coil normally a little handheld detected got a little brain a little coil a little wire got a big coil not a giant one but a medium-sized one here plug it into here turn this on this is what's going to detect it well i've left steve down on the flats he's uh putting together a portable metal detector for us to carry he's really in the dog house today because he forgot to bring the connectors for the for the big slough while he's messing about with that i'm up here in the hills trying to find the location of the largest buccaneer to meteorite vm6 which weighed 868 kilos almost a ton it shows you how difficult meteorite hunting is even with the coordinates we can't find the location of a meteorite that's already been found with just a few hours of daylight jeff sees an anomaly in the distance that's quite interesting [Music] why is there a pile of black sands there i decided to take off in the truck and drive up the hill and boom i come across this fantastic impact pit it's just an amazing moment of of history preserved on a hilltop out there in the desert [Music] oh it's highly magnetic these look like meteorite fragments i bet this is one of the fine sights oh yeah look at that jeff confirms this is the landmark needed to extrapolate their position within the stream field and get back to the hunt for big space rocks there are fragments all over the place here wow wow these are actually pieces of one of the meteorites it's not just the rocks that are amazing to me it's everything about them where they come from how they get here how they interact with the earth when they hit and so any record of their journey and their effect on our planet is mesmerizing to me this may be the exact spot where the giant mass landed this was a big meteorite 868 kilos almost a ton but not big enough to explode on impact and make a crater so fell out of the sky at a few hundred miles an hour bam right into the ground here and rested here until it was found in the 1800s by miners the vacuum huerta meteorite was discovered by mining prospectors in 1861. it's estimated to be the largest mesocyterite discovered to date with more than 3782 kilograms of material recovered there is no accurate account of what became of the giant space rock but the miners left a few clues near the impact pit over 100 years ago we know the miners broke it up into various pieces so there's a pile of meteorite dust and fragments they may have broken some pieces off to see if if it contains silver or another valuable metal and there's still remnants of their work left behind i think i'll flag this so we can find it a bit more easily next time with current values of between two and eight dollars per gram this size rock could have been worth over a million dollars in today's market i suppose i better go check on steve tell him i found the spot steve and his pvc metal detector aren't having much luck but jeff's discovery of the impact pit means they're back on track so check this out um just over the hill here i drove around a bit and then saw a just a big weird pile of black dust and got out checked it out and um it's a big pile of meteorite fragments look cool it looks like maybe a meteorite landed right there okay and so we should go back there with the detectors i just picked these up off the top most definitely [Music] so here's where i found those little fragments so did you just spot those with your eyes yeah i just saw the pile and i thought well that doesn't really look like terrestrial stuff and then oh look at that bunch of fragrances and then look just up here this looks like an impact pit to me a really big one oh look at that green and that's indicative of words isn't it it is so i'm thinking it actually landed here maybe they carted the stuff off and sifted it down there i hate to come all this way and just pick up some little crumbs but i'd hate to come all this way and go home and not bring home some crumbs why don't we take a minute and bag some of that sure with just a couple hours left on the third day jeff and steve decide to collect stardust from the historic fall you know as crazy as it seems you know someone would pay five bucks for a little vial of this stuff it's history jeff came across an old impact pit and then a pile of debris which was the result of sifting by some scientists some years ago look at this wow really nice one they had to leave the sand and they had to leave the little tiny pieces of meteorites because it was probably one of the 500 to a thousand pound rocks and um they left a lot of material behind look at that there are chunks in there yeah there are i'm finding little pieces that are uh worth five ten twenty bucks you know when you're finding nothing all day long it's kind of hard to walk away from stuff that's sitting there not to mention the little dust it's not worth much but hey you know every bit counts okay got to put our brain together how can we sift through this quickly we got the sieve in there he used to save in the shovel all right let's see if that'll help harden our dust while we renovate yeah baby all right we're getting bigger ones all right this is worth it doesn't look like much but even at 25 cents a gram 20 kilos worth it's 5 000 worth pays a plane ticket to get here [Music] the next day begins with one of the eeriest discoveries these guys have ever made the vacuum water i wonder if this is the origin of the name of the strewn field these have been here a long time long time look at this that's part of a hoof isn't it yeah that's gross i think toenail well should we test and see if a meteorite hit it and killed it i think we should [Music] something there oh is this grave rubbing um yes something over here too anything on your magnet yeah no it says it's a quarter behind quarter maybe oh look at that hot on horseshoe oh attached to a hoof that is really creepy this is good luck well not for the donkey or burrow i guess it's not a cow i was just gonna say that to the best of my knowledge cows don't wear horseshoes this is great that's definitely up there as with the most interesting meteorologist we found on this one los hombres midritos the bones have been picked clean over the years and so is the case for the large end of the vaccumer to stroom field with their bearings and their pockets full of stardust the guys finally plot a course to the small end of the strewn field determined to unearth valuable vacuum huerta meteorites you know what we should do is plot that and we should drive that line with the coil okay just just head to the small end following that line dead on sounds like a plan nice we've done everything backwards we came out to the big end to get the information we needed to build a map to send us back to the small end where we actually want to be and that's what meteorite hunting is sometimes so we built the sled we're towing it behind the pickup jeff's in back kind of looking like a cosmic fisherman there waiting for a nibble uh it's pretty boring probably a little dusty back there i know it's a bumpy every once while he yells slow down well we just went over something stay big target i wasn't paying attention that much because we're expecting something to be under the ground all of a sudden jeff hollers that we ran over something real loud one dude are you serious dude yeah wow it is are you sure oh look it's got some of the green on it but it fits all iron it doesn't it feel like solid iron yeah this one is like i'm pretty sure it is a meteorite it was nestled next to a larger rock and uh just blended right in with the desert maybe it's just a big nodule but the vodkas that we've seen are all kind of they're you know brownie orangey because they're like underground i expect that i can always identify a meteorite instantaneously and in this instance i i can't i'm genuinely puzzled the best i can say is that it could be wouldn't you expect a vacuum huerta to be about half that weight because it's half silicates and half iron i mean that just feels like an iron meteorite to me it's gotta be what else is gonna be out here it's not a hammer it's not an anvil i will do a happy dance after it goes to the lab and it's cut if it turns out to be the real thing and and we hear this all the time wolf it's not a meteorite what is it but i'm going to say if that's not a meteorite what is it come on that's a good question actually all right this isn't fun i want to be excited you can be excited yeah but i don't want to be excited and then let down if it's a meteorite i don't want to not be excited about it because that's the fun of hunting it's getting out hearing the score and the adrenaline rushing yeah you know you found it okay the could be meteorite weighs in at three and a half kilos which could fetch anywhere between 10 and 25 000 depending on its quality and uniqueness cool or it could be worthless so i can think of three options one is it's a piece of man-made iron from an old smelter that was left out here by prospectors two it's a piece of the vodka meteorite but it's an iron heavy section mesocyterites are don't have a homogeneous interior some of it's more iron rich some of it's more silicate-rich so it's possible that it's an iron-rich nodule from the vodka meteorite the third option is it's a brand new meteorite there's nothing to do with black muerta that we just happen to stumble upon out here so they're my they're my three options all right i could stand here looking at this all day let's go let's let's pack up sending this back to the states and we can celebrate right it's just frustrating and i'm the optimist it's jeff's job to be grumpy of course i wish i could know right now i mean i want to know this instant if it's the real thing because if it is i want to celebrate last few hours of the last day we make potentially a great find but i just can't let myself have that last little bit of joy you know i've been disappointed too many times not including the last big find the chile expedition netted over twelve thousand dollars in meteorites a big success but the trip will be one of their best ever if they can verify that their last three and a half kilogram find is in fact a space rock they sent the vodka meteorite to arizona state university for analysis we're finally here at asu we're going to find out today whether this rock that we found is either a meteorite or not and if it is is it a voca morton meteorite or is it a brand new one if this is a vodka morte what's inside is what really counts and it could just be kind of blah a little bit of metal here a little bit of silicates there and not be that special or it could be really dynamic each one of these and even each slice can be different so i'm pretty sure it's a meteorite but but but how good of a meteorite is it that's what we got to find out so so it was cut into three pieces so i'm looking at the outside and thinking what on earth were you guys looking at and then it actually got sent and that she got sliced wow what do you think of that now that okay i was just kidding with you guys that is amazing that is absolutely beautiful this rules this is one of the most fantastic meteorites i've ever seen it's absolutely spectacular it's stunning as far as i'm going it's pretty clearly vaca muerta that's a pretty amazing sabbath actually it's far better than our samples really oh this is way too i don't think you've ever said that to us yeah no i haven't the mystery's finally over the strange and puzzling rock that we found that last day in the vacuum where to strewn field has turned out not only to be a genuine vacuum where it's a meteorite but the best we've ever seen so congratulations you're fine thank you so much absolutely fantastic it's a phenomenal space rock it's gorgeous it's rare it's scientifically interesting and it's just been a huge victory for us a rock this size sliced up with this quality it's worth twenty five thousand dollars easy the vacuum where to meteorite may add only one to their total count but it's one of the rarest bringing the cumulative value of all their fines to approximately thirty seven thousand dollars this is one instance where i'm very pleased to have been proved wrong i have to say fair is fair steve was absolutely convinced it was the real deal i was just iffy 13 years ago jeff and i dropped by the vodka site and all we found were a couple little pieces we didn't even try because we'd almost given up on it this time we decided let's go back let's give it an honest try we knew how to hunt we knew more about strewn fields we knew more about our equipment we're out there and we score the trophy rock we bring it back there's nothing better than saying this is what i want to do going out nailing it and and and bringing the trophy home the redemption was sweet

Channel: Meteorite Men

Views: 16,212

Keywords: meteorite men tv show, meteorite men season 2, science tv shows, meteorite men, meteorites, meteorite men full episode, science channel tv shows, meteorite men series, space rocks, science channel, meteorites documentary, factual tv, scientific tv series

Id: Dwp2oJFpRnw

Length: 47min 30sec (2850 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 09 2020