"I bought it to keep with my meteorite collection," said Pieter Heydelaar, an Australian gem dealer who collects meteorites as a hobby. "But apparently the thing has become rather valuable. I mean, everybody wants it," he said. "If somebody guarantees me a certain price, I'll say, 'Oh God, I can't afford to keep it for that amount of money,' and I'll just sell it."

"It's evocative of tribal art . . . It might very well be the most aesthetically valuable satellite artifact that we have."
     

Early indications are that Heydelaar may be hard-pressed to justify holding on to the tank.

"At auction, it'd get $30,000 to $50,000 at the cheap end," said Mike Farmer, a meteorite collector and dealer whose sharp eye noticed micrometeorite impact craters in the satellite tank. The outside surface is pocked with about half a dozen tiny craters, scarcely bigger than large sand grains. They were most likely created when small meteorites smashed into the satellite in space.

Heydelaar points to the largest of the micrometeorite impact craters (circled with a pencil line) on the outside of the tank's titanium and aluminum shell.

"It's evocative of tribal art. Because of the ablation and the markings, and the dent in the bottom, Those really gives it an aesthetic value that goes beyond its uniqueness," Pitt said. "It might very well be the most aesthetically valuable satellite artifact that we have."

Ablation refers to the streaks of melted metal that formed as material around an opening melted when the tank reentered the atmosphere. Faint lettering with definite Cyrillic characters -- used in the Russian alphabet -- is also visible. The round tank sits nicely on flat surfaces too -- thanks to a dent that formed where the sphere thudded into the hard desert ground.

These ablation markings were created during reentry into Earth's atmosphere as material around an opening melted and flowed off in small rivulets.

Pitt said his group intends to try to work a deal with Heydelaar to offer the tank at auction.

The tank apparently fell to Earth in April or May 1988, about three years after the satellite's launch. Graham Ducas, an employee of the Western Australia State Water Company, found the tank in June 1988, while prospecting in the Australian desert. Patches of badly burned vegetation and visible new growth near the impact site helped pin down the date of the fall to a few months before Ducas happened upon the metallic shell.

The Australian government took it for a brief time in order to determine its origin, but after that it sat in Ducas' back yard for 11 years, Heydelaar said.

"I had been trying to buy it for a few years," Heydelaar said. "All of a sudden he figured he'd looked at it long enough. I told him I'd appreciate it more than he would and he sold it to me."

Foton 1 operated for about 12 days before its science payload capsule was brought out of orbit to land in Kazakstan for recovery. It was the first of the Foton series, which used Vostok-style spacecraft to conduct science experiments in microgravity. At launch, the spacecraft weighed more than 13,500 pounds (6,200 kilograms). The recoverable payload capsule took up about 1,500-pounds (700 kilograms) of that weight.

This diagram shows the elements of the Soviet Vostok-style satellite. Tanks like the one found in Australia are mounted around the edge of the satellite (#7). They hold compressed nitrogen used by the attitude-control thrusters.

1. Battery capsule for the power supply.
2. Reentry capsule for the microgravity experiment payloads.
3. Spacecraft instrument module.
4. Thermal control baffles.
5. Radio antennas.
6. Solid fuel reentry engine.
7. Spherical tanks for compressed nitrogen gas.
8. Attitude-adjustment and control sensors.
9. Payload experiments.
10. Pyrotechnic charge to de-link reentry capsule from the spacecraft.
11. Thermal control baffles for battery capsule.