The meteorite ‘hunter’ who greets and shelters China’s visitors from the cosmos
Yang Kexin has rejected numerous monetary offers for the meteor fragments she has collected in the desert, preferring to share them with the public for nothing
“What do stars in the sky look like? Can I pick them down?” the young Yang Kexin would ask herself on summer nights, gazing up at the heavens from the yard of her childhood home in southwest China’s rural Guizhou province.
As she grew up, her dream of gathering stars took a back seat to the more earthly matters of adult life, but she never stopped thinking about those remote incandescent bodies that illuminated the night sky.
Then one day, Yang’s work took her to Xinjiang in China’s arid northwest. In the region’s vast Gobi desert, she reconnected with her childhood passion and launched a life filled with adventure tied to those mysterious visitors from the cosmos.
Yang is a “meteorite hunter”.
In her zeal to capture fragments of meteors, she has criss-crossed the Gobi hundreds of times. In the past five years, she has harvested more than 600 specimens of meteorites weighing a total of 400kg (882 pounds).
“I have donated some of my meteorites to mainland scientists to research, because the biggest value for meteorites is for scientific research,” Yang, 28, told the South China Morning Post.