Scientists on Wednesday recovered what could be the largest part of this meteor from Chebarkul Lake outside the city.
They weighed it using a giant steelyard balance, which displayed 570 kilograms (1,256 pounds) before it broke. (AP Photo/Alexander Firsov)
Russian divers Wednesday pulled from a murky lake in the Urals a half-tonne suspected meteorite said to have been part of a meteor whose ground-shaking shockwave hurt 1,200 people in February.
The dramatic recovery operation came eight months after a piercing streak of light lit up the morning sky in the central Russian region of Chelyabinsk in scenes some locals said made them think of the onset of a nuclear war.
The meteor broke up into myriad pieces—some no bigger than the size of a fingernail—that scientists are still finding across the remote region to this day.
Much of the debris landed in a local lake called Chebarkul that the divers entered on Wednesday in an operation covered live on national television.
Broadcasts showed a team pull out a 1.5-metre-long (five-foot-long) rock from the lake after first wrapping it in a special casing while it was still underwater.
The boulder was then pulled ashore and placed on top of a massive scale for the all-important weighing—an operation that quickly went partially wrong.
The rock crumbled into several chunks as scientists began lifting it from the ground with the help of levers and ropes.
The scale itself broke the moment it hit the 570-kilogramme (1,255-pound) mark.
"The rock had a fracture when we found it," one unnamed scientist told the lifenews.ru website in a live broadcast.
"It weighed 570 kgs before the pieces fell off and then the scale broke," said the scientist.
"We think the whole thing weighs more than 600 Kgs," he said.
Experts warned it will take time before scientists can certify that the rock they pulled from the lake did indeed come from outer space.
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