Divers have found a half-ton piece of the asteroid that exploded over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk last Feb.
The meteorite chunk was found in Lake Chebarkul, where it crashed through the ice leaving a nearly 20-foor-long hole, the BBC reported.
The meteor strike was considered to be the most dramatic in a century. The shockwave from the explosion injured 1,600 people, it is believed to have been as strong as 20 Hiroshima atomic bombs, the Associated Press reported via ABC News.
The team attempted to weigh the giant rock, believed to be the largest piece of the meteor discovered. It weighed in at 1,256 pounds before breaking.
The meteor broke into "three large pieces" as researchers were attempting to lift it with ropes and levers, the BBC reported. The scale was also badly damaged during the endeavor.
Doctor Caroline Smith, curator of meteorites at London's Natural History Museum, said she could recognize that the rock was a piece of meteorite because of visible fusion crust and regmaglypts.
"Fusion crust forms as the meteoroid is travelling through the atmosphere as a fireball," Smith told BBC News. "The outer surface gets so hot it melts the rock to form a dark, glassy surface crust which we term a fusion crust. Regmaglypts are the indentations that look a bit like thumbprints, also seen on the surface of the meteorite."
"The preliminary examination... shows that this is really a fraction of the Chelyabinsk meteorite," Sergey Zamozdra, an associate professor at Chelyabinsk State University, told the Interfax news agency, the BBC reported. "This chunk is most probably one of the top 10 biggest meteorite fragments ever found."
About 12 pieces of meteorite have been removed from the lake so far, but only four or five of the findings turned out to be actual meteorite fragments, the Vesti 24 news channel reported via the BBC.
