Meet the Meteorite Hunters Who Rush In When Space Rocks Crash to Earth

Photo caption: Of all the meteors that flash across our sky, about 99.5 percent burn up in the atmosphere. Professionals and amateurs alike hunt for the fraction of space rocks that actually crash to Earth. Photo credit: Bob Riha Jr. / Getty Images. Article by Sarah Durn. Atlas Obscura – September 29, 2022.

For this community of “space cowboys,” entrepreneurs, and enthusiasts, a fireball streaming across the sky offers big risks and bigger rewards—and new tech is heating up the competition.

It’s around 8 a.m. on April 27, 2022. A woman outside of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, is relaxing in her hot tub, lulled into a quiet calm as her horses neigh in the distance. Suddenly, a blinding red-yellow light shoots across the sky. In Baton Rouge, Louisiana, a man stuck in traffic sees the same light ignite the heavens—“like a welder’s torch,” he’d later write in an eyewitness account. […]

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