All this week, SPACE.com looks at the latest news from the world of meteorite hunters and profiles many of the key players in the meteorite market. Find out what drives them and how they came to dedicate their energy to rocks from space.

Darryl Pitt looks at meteorites with the eye of an art critic: It's all about the aesthetic quality of a rock. Its shape, its balance, the form of iron surfaces sculpted by the blaze of collision with Earth's atmosphere at fantastic speeds.

It started with what Pitt calls the aesthetic iron meteorites -- striking looking pieces of extraterrestrial metal that Pitt found evocative of works by modernist sculptors like Henry Moore or Alberto Giacometti.

"These are natural works of art from outer space," Pitt says.

The year was 1991, and Pitt began buying elegantly sculpted pieces as often as he could find people selling them. "At the time there really wasn't much emphasis placed on the aesthetic qualities of meteorites," Pitt recalled. "I was just gobbling them all up because I was astonished that the meteorite community hadn't recognized their value. I mean some of these were being sold for just $50 a pound," Pitt said. He thought that was extraordinarily undervalued.

Meteorites stand out from terrestrial stones by their relatively high metal content. The most common meteorites are made primarily of stony material sprinkled with bits and chunks of metal throughout, but some meteorites are solid iron.

This 16-pound (7.5-kilogram) iron meteorite was found in the Kalahari Desert in Namibia. Pitt is offering it for sale at an auction later this year.

Scientists believe these ingots of space metal are the remains of the iron cores of several dozen small planetary bodies that once orbited the sun between Mars and Jupiter. Billions of years of collisions since then have pulverized these bodies into the gravelly asteroid belt, and placed some errant debris on courses that eventually sent them crashing to Earth.

Pitt became a huge fan and avid collector of meteorites, but eventually found that the price of the types of meteorites he coveted was too high. The only way to reduce costs was to purchase much more material than he wanted for his own collection, which turned him into a de facto dealer.

The complication was that Pitt didn't need a full-time profession. He had moved out of photography and began working as a manager and agent to a handful of recording artists. He entertained great fantasies about tramping off into the wilderness to search for newly fallen meteorites, much the way Robert Haag -- the dealer who inspired him -- did. But Pitt knew that wasn't realistic.

"I knew I couldn't do what he did in terms of going out and running around to places going after meteorites because I was tethered to an office in New York," Pitt explained.

"What I could do was effect great exchanges because I was traveling all over the place for just a few days at a time. So instead of going out into the fields where they were, I would go to the museums, and I became really involved in cross-pollinating a lot of collections," Pitt said.

"I would be like a little bumble bee: I'd go over to China and I'd give them a little bit of my stuff and they'd give me a little bit of their stuff. Then I'd fly over to the Smithsonian and I'd give them a little bit of the stuff I got from China, they'd give me a little bit of their stuff. And I'd fly back over to the British Museum."

Pitt made exchanges anywhere he could, and he found it to be great fun. "The only way I can describe it is like a little boy's trading cards. It became like a sophisticated version of that."

And like young baseball-card traders, who learn every aspect and keep up with the latest statistics of the game, Pitt began studying meteorites.

"I made a point of just learning more and more and more," Pitt said. "To the extent that I was a dilettante, I wanted the experts whom I made exchanges with to know that I was someone who took the obligation to science very seriously."

His most unique contribution, though, has been to art -- or at least the art of meteorites. "What I have done is I've opened up a whole [new] marketplace aside from the science-fair crowd and the geology crowd," Pitt said.

The iron meteorites are not the exotic specimens prized by dedicated meteorite collectors and scientists. They are fairly common. Hundreds of tons exist worldwide, but only a fraction of the irons have the form to be considered art.

Pitt also solicited metal galleries throughout the country, and crusaded to show designers and decorators the decorative qualities of the most beautiful meteorites. Now, it is not uncommon for pieces to sell for $500 to $1,000 per pound, Pitt said.

Even though meteorite dealing has become a business for Pitt and he deeply loves the artistic qualities of meteorites, he says he always puts science first. "Had I known more about meteorites when I was younger, I mean, had I known this could have been an avenue of study like geology, there's an excellent, excellent chance it's something I would have pursued. So among the next best things I can do is help those who have committed their lives to this research," Pitt said.

One of his most memorable moments of Pitt's meteorite-trading career came during a trip to China a few years ago. He had a piece of a martian meteorite and he was talking with a group of Chinese scientists who had done geochemical analysis on a sample of lunar material from one of the U.S. Apollo missions.

The United States distributed samples of the moon rocks to nations around the world, but China received only a few grams.

The scientists, Pitt recalls, told him how proud they were of their resourcefulness using that lunar material. They were able to publish nearly 20 different research papers from just one and a half grams of sample, Pitt said. Hearing that, he resolved to be more generous with his Mars rock than the U.S. government had been with its lunar sample. Setting it on the table, he announced his intention to donate the small piece of Mars.

"They pushed it down, down, down to the end of this long table. And this head scientist -- the eldest -- this guy started hyperventilating and crying because it was his life's ambition to be able to access this material," Pitt said.