After the Chelyabinsk meteor tore through the Earth's atmosphere and crashed into a Russian town earlier this year, a meteorite from the space rock is coming in for a gentler landing at Chicago's Field Museum.
Tuesday, the Sun-Times reported a collector donated pieces of Chelyabinsk meteorite to the museum for scientists to study.
According to DNAinfo Chicago, Terry Boudreaux is the private meteorite collector who has a "long history of sharing his finds with the museum."
"[Boudreaux] came in this morning and brought in nine bags full of meteorites from that particular event," Philipp Heck, the Field Museum's assistant curator of meteoritics, said Tuesday.
Later this month, the meteorite will be on display during members’ nights on April 18 and 19, according to a statement from the Field Museum. DNAinfo reports the Field Museum's president has issued a directive to get the rocks on display even sooner to the public, if possible.
Now that it's landed in Chicago, the meteorite will be studied by the Field Museum's Robert A. Pritzker Center For Meteoritics And Polar Studies, which the museum says houses the largest non-government meteorite collection in the world.
Shortly after the meteor landing, Heck spoke with Vocalo about the significance of the Chelyabinsk impact.
The meteor exploded over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk on Feb. 15, leaving more than 1,000 people injured as it blew out windows across the region.
After the meteor made contact — leaving a 20-foot-wide hole in the ice covering a nearby lake — local residents started selling collected fragments on the black market.
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