Bedrock Bob

Follow the yellow brick road and find the Wizard Clay. He will have the knowledge you need. Or simply scan this forum for his many discussions on the subject. If your heart is pure and you ask a worthy question he will sometimes appear in a puff of English Leather and bless you with an answer. If not you must seek him out or lure him from his lair. A good way to do that is to post something technically wrong and he will come out of nowhere to correct you. I will give it a try... I know the laws are different from State to State. All I have heard is that a claim on Sate land is possible in New Mexico but just not probable. They do not allow a mining lease and a grass lease to exist on the same acreage. Most State Trust land that a guy would claim is already under lease for ranching or mining/oil/gas/etc.. So for all practical purposes there are no "claims" on State Trust land. I have heard Arizona is much the same....Darn near impossible for a recreational guy to hold any mineral rights on State Trust land. But... A guy can go to the State Land Commissioner and appeal to them just about any business venture and have it considered. It is not a "claim" situation. It is more of a business proposition and the Commission can lease land to a business for a lot of reasons. And if the other lessor(s) of the land are in agreement it is not impossible. I know a rancher, a solar generation company and the State has entered into a big deal like that. I know a large mining company with a big operation certainly can. Whether a small prospector could be successful at holding a State Trust claim is debatable. It is certainly not probable. It would be more of an active lease than a "claim" if it did exist. Doubt any word of mouth stories you hear about claims and who owns them. Doubly doubt claims that appear to be filed on State Trust land. Assume a whole lot of people are filing a whole lot of claims for a whole lot of reasons besides gold. Assume a lot of claims are filed with a written description that does not match the spot they are physically marked. Assume there are many claims filed over each other and over State/private/National Forest land that are not valid. I know of a lot of State Trust land that is posted as a federal mining claim and worked for placer. Just about every piece of State Trust land in the area I work is posted as a Federal Mining Claim. But the mineral rights still belong to the State on most of it and the part of the claim that overlies State Trust land is not valid.

Great big vesicles dragging in the dirt behind it. Like a tote sack with a couple of melons in it.

It is oxidation and weathering of the surface. It isn't fusion crust nor is it a meteorite. Sorry.

its botryoidal hematite.

NORAD ID number.... Makes all kinds of sense. Thanks!

Since we are talking about being trapped in a tight spot we cant back out of I refuse to make a joke about the turning radius of a full size Dodge Ram pickup. I just won't do it.

Just put a bible on the dash bro. Problem solved. It is like a "get out of jail free" card in Texas. I used to visit a girl named Sechita Gonzales. She could cook a mean duck too. She was such an athletic beauty back then. Now parts of her are like meteorites. They have regmaglypts, fusion crust and they are plummeting to the ground.

Now look who is stretching the truth over his nose! There is no way to make me believe that a book trumps a puppy for softening up the flinty attitude of a difficult to date female. I will believe this object is a meteorite before I would believe that. The order is and always will be; 1- guitars 2- puppies 3- books That is just the natural order of things and cannot be changed.

I was talking about the little bud in the ashtray with the pot leaf on it. First and third photo. Is it magnetic? (The object, not the little bud) It is not a meteorite (neither the object nor the weed). Of that there is no doubt. Aside from that it is just a wild a$$ guess based on a photo. Just like the bud, the key and the lighter.

It does look like a silicon carbide/slag "concretion" from under the grinder. I think that is a very intuitive observation and probably a very close guess. My chop saw gets a big hunk of that stuff built up under it and I break off fist sized chunks of it all the time. That could have easily been left hanging on the guard after a quickie saw cut through a cast pipe. It would be heavy and scratch the hell out of glass. It would look a whole lot like that. Another excellent observation my friend!

It looks like silica/metal cinders to me. What they make cinder blocks out of. It is a product of an refractory process. If it is heavy it is from a refining process and most folks would call it "slag". It is foliated so I would say it was chiseled out of the flue of a furnace. It was probably destined to be added to a masonry mortar or non-structural concrete like a sidewalk. You mentioned resistance to conducting heat. I don't know how you arrive at that conclusion but ash/slag/clinker is insulative and extremely reflective. They chisel it from the furnace parts to allow more efficient heating/cooling. It is definitely not a meteorite and if you saw it fall then someone threw it at you. If it is natural it is a volcanic cinder. I think you have a by product of a refractory process . Assume the object is a creation of industry. The little bud in the ash try is an indica dominant strain that was probably purchased at a dispensary in the Pacific Northwest. It was raised under HID lights and harvested one week early due to a ventilation problem in the grow room. It cost $12 per gram and was paid for with a $100 dollar bill. It is unclear about the total of the purchase but you received at least one $20 back as change. It was green. The key is to the back door of your home and is a replacement purchased at a big name hardware store not more than 3 years ago. The key code is K37562. It is one of twelve unique keys for the Sentry model security locksets. Anyone who can see this photo can easily duplicate the key and gain access to your home. You need to purchase a new lighter. That one is almost out of butane.

What sound does it make?

Like ammonia and fish kinda blended together. Way nasty stuff. A guy that smells it is overexposed for a year or more. If you get it on your skin you get a check for the rest of your life. I know a couple guys who have had that happen. If you have been in a spill so bad that you tasted it then it was quite the accident for sure. I think I would be looking for a lawyer. Concentrations like that definitely left some damage. There are a few different blends of that stuff. Some are used for hypergolic engines. Binary fuel engines that ignite spontaneously when the fuel and oxidizer run together. Then there is the engines that use just straight hydrazine and an ignition source. Those are used in atmospheres containing oxygen. Straight anhydrous hydrazine is used in aircraft, boilers and even artillery rounds. Maybe keyed locks too. In space where there is no oxygen they use Aerozine, monomethyl hydrazine and UDMMH (unsymmtrical diethyl monomethyl hydrazine) in conjunction with nitrogen tetroxide as an oxidizer. No ignition source needed. It is hypergolic and fires when the fuel and ox comes in contact. So out in space where there is no oxygen they use a different juice. And it mixes with an oxidizer. There is a difference between straight hydrazine and the rocket fuel kind. It is a different but similar compound with different properties. There were two spherical tanks on the satellite. One with MMH and one with Nitrogen Tetroxide. They are manifolded to a switch/valve apparatus and then to a series of little Vernier "engines" that fire just like a .22 when an attitude adjustment is needed. These have thrust cones of various sizes that are faced with columbium (tantalum) rare earth metal. (These tiles are everlasting and will easily survive re-entry. If there is a prize find it would be a tantalum thrust cone for sure!!) They are mounted all over at different angles and are sometimes movable. They are operated by a computer. So if the satellite gets a bit out of whack one of those little engines goes "pop" and a tiny bit of thrust brings things back in line. So it keeps the satellite oriented and can also lift it farther into orbit when it gets too close to earth. So the whole propulsion system on a satellite is a couple of fuel/ox spheres, a valve and a switch operated by a computer, and a dozen little rocket engines about the size of your thumb. It is probably the most durable and likely to survive hardware on most satellites. The rest is made out of aluminum and carbon fiber and burns up easily. The only durable part on most of that space junk is the propulsion system. Those cone shaped columbium thrusters would orient just like a shuttlecock and withstand the nastiest ablation. But they are tiny and would be super difficult to locate. Even the big Space Shuttle thrusters were no bigger than a motorcycle engine... The cone was six feet long and three wide but the engine itself was not much more than an 18" gas stove burner with two sets of holes. One for fuel and one for ox. A switch and a valve and a couple of stainless steel lines. The entire set up might weigh 20-30 lbs. It makes one hell of a big fire though. It would vaporize a half million gallons of water in a series of ten second bursts. Freaking awesome power like you cant even imagine. You could watch it in the test cell on camera just rockin' it and the whole cone turning cherry red. You look out the window and the steam is shooting out of a venturi fifty feet long and fifteen feet across and going all the way up in the clouds. It is surreal what such tiny, seemingly delicate hardware can do.

That schite is light. Mostly titanium alloy stuff. There is not enough weight to any of it to be much of a hazard. And there is probably not enough fuel left to hurt you if you licked it clean. So in reality there is probably little risk. I honestly don't think that anyone tracks that stuff after it becomes useless. Much of it is owned by companies that are long gone. Maybe some of it is. I have heard discussions about the problem of so much junk up there. You would think that the liability would be huge but the risk very small. I would imagine most of that junk burns up and the tiny bit that does make it to the ground they will deal with when the time comes. If a person handles a fallen NASA space flight article and has one tiny problem the government is the bad guy. It is cheaper to spend millions on cleanup and decontamination than to deal with the lawsuits and bad press. For a private company that may or may not even be in business anymore I bet the strategy is "let it fall". I honestly think hunting space junk is going to be the hobby of the future. It is almost as cool as meteorites. And the falls and finds are just going to get more frequent. I'm betting an oriented Tesla brake rotor with a sweet fusion crust, flow lines and a roll over lip will be worth a pantload of frogskins someday soon.

And I am quite sure all those "volitals" weren't vaporized in "decent". The pieces are not going to hurt anyone. They are more of a legal liability than an actual health risk. But only a fool would get too intimate with the thing. It isn't safe. To make any assumptions that it was decontaminated during re-entry would not be wise. Sometimes actual real world experience trumps the Google type of knowledge. Just sayin'.