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[i]Loeb sees the opportunity to locate fragments of the 2014 meteor as a unique one: An object has landed on Earth and is now within grasp for far less time, money, and effort than what it would require to send a vessel into space to collect samples of interstellar material. His plan is to spend a week or so digging around for remnants of the meteor, which likely split into many tiny pieces and has dispersed over around six miles in the Pacific Ocean, from a ship. Though he's still figuring out exactly what a magnetized deep sea retrieval device would look like, Loeb is in early conversations with funders and a ship operator. He suspects the final design will need to be slightly different from existing devices designed to locate objects from within our solar system, but those offer a starting point. "All we can imagine are things that we've seen before," Loeb said. "Usually what you get from meteors like that, that end up impacting the ocean, is a lot of fragments the size of the head of a needle. They're really small, a millimeter or less, and there's lots of them and you can scoop them up because they're magnetized. So if you use a magnet and sort of go over the ocean surface, you can collect them."[/i]
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