A Maine museum is offering a $25,000 reward for the retrieval of meteorite fragments that made landfall near the Canadian border.
The Maine Mineral & Gem Museum said in a Facebook post that the fireball was visible in the April 8 daytime sky over Washington County, Maine, and Doppler radar from NASA indicated pieces of the space rock crashed to earth near Calais, which is close to the border with Canada.
The museum is offering a $25,000 reward for the first person who finds and turns over a meteorite fragment weighing at least 2.2 pounds.
Darryl Pitt, head of the meteorite division at the Maine Mineral & Gem Museum, said the museum is also willing to offer smaller amounts of cash for any size piece of the space rock.
"Finding meteorites in woods of Maine. It's not the simplest of the environments," Pitt told CNN. "It's a sparsely populated area but not as sparsely populated as where most meteorites fall -- the ocean."
Pitt said hundreds of meteorites fall to earth each year, but only eight to 10 of the space rocks are recovered by researchers annually.
He said the meteorite pieces would be distinguishable from normal rocks due to having blackened exteriors from entering the atmosphere.