December 2020 - Lab Grown Magazine

December 2020 | The Lab Grown Diamond Resource Book 22 To advertise call (888) 832-1109 | December 2020 23 The asteroid Ryugu, as seen by Japan’s Hayabusa2 spacecraft on June 26, 2018. (Photo: JAXA, Uni- versity of Tokyo, Kochi University, Rikkyo Univer- sity, Nagoya University, Chiba Institute of Tech- nology, Meiji University, University of Aizu, AIST) personal Facebook page, the young casket creator knew he could throw away his ham- mer. His newfound gift from God was valued at US$1.3 million. After verifying the photo, Jared Collins, a U.S. meteorite expert recalls that his associ- ates were “Lighting up my phone with crazy offers for me to jump on a plane and buy this fricking meteorite.” In the midst of the Covid crisis, though, he had two choices: “Buy the rock for myself and resell it or work with fellow collectors and break it up.” Collins ended up carrying a suitcase of cash from Indianapolis to Indonesia to find the owner. The meteorite was sold and shipped to the U.S. for an undisclosed price, report- edly purchased by a fellow meteorite collec- tor in the USA. ARussian Secret:Trillions of Carats The massive Popigai crater in Russia was formed about 35 million years ago by an asteroid whose impact was over 26,000 feet wide. Its collision created a wealth of impact diamonds when an existing diamond seam was hit by this space gem of a rock. Experts estimate that this diamond discovery could supply the natural diamond market world- wide for the next 3,000 years. But which diamond market ? Gem-quality and industrial grade diamonds are as different as night and day. Nikolai Pokhilenko, direc- tor of the Novosibirsk Institute of Geology and Mineralogy, stated that these diamonds are “twice as hard as normal diamonds,”mak- ing them ideal for industrial use. He claimed that the Russian-owned Popigai crater is ten times the size of the rest of the world’s reserves, thus holding trillions of carats. Discovered in a scientific expedition in the 1970s, the Government of the Soviet Union decided to keep their find a secret so as not to disturb world markets. Surely, they also Below: An image of a space rock moving from asteroid to meteor to micrometeoroid. (Illustration: NASA/JPL-Caltech) >>