It's been six years since the meteor lit up the skies over Whitehorse and a large part of southern Yukon.

It's also been six years of Jim Brook's life arranging a deal to keep in Canada the meteorite material he recovered from the ice on Tagish Lake.

It's done now, though.

While the Atlin, B.C. man declines flat-out to talk about what sort of money he received, he did express a little frustration at having to negotiate his way through the federal bureaucracy that finally inked a deal last week.

The lodge owner and former commercial pilot did keep some of the meteorite that was water-damaged.

The 850 grams of pristine material, however, is now in the hands of the University of Alberta, the Royal Ontario Museum and Natural Resources Canada.

The bulk of it, 650 grams, is with the university, which has the second-largest meteorite collection in Canada.

With the acquistion of what's now called the Tagish Lake meteorite, the university has elevated its collection to one of worldwide significance.

The university unveiled a chunk of the meteorite at a public viewing event held last Friday.

The Tagish Lake meteorite is described by scholars as one-of-a-kind, with the rare ability to provide researchers with insight into how the solar system was formed 4.6 billion years ago.

There was significant interest in the event from across Canada and the United States, by both academics and at least one private dealer who quickly arrived in Whitehorse to let it be known he was willing to pay big money for a piece of the rock.

It's been reported in other media that Brook was paid several hundred thousand dollars.

What was important to him, and what has been important to him all along, he said in an interview this morning, is that the material remain in Canada for research here.

Brook was in Whitehorse on business and sitting in an office so did not actually see the meteorite when it set the sky on fire as it passed overhead.

He did, however, piece together the likely path of trajectory from the dust trail if left in the sky. Several days afterward, he flew that path in hopes of seeing something from the air, but was unsuccessful.

Brook said it wasn't until about a week later ,when he was driving a truck-load of supplies across the ice into the Tagish Lake resort, that he came across the meteorite.

It was getting late in the afternoon, and he was already using the headlights to see when he suddenly he noticed a piece no more than seven centimetres (three inches) long.

'I was pretty surprised,' he said. 'It was amazing to recover anything.'

Brook said when you consider the odds of locating material from a meteorite, he was downright lucky.

With 70 per cent of the Earth covered in water, it could easily have ended up in the drink. As it was, it landed on Tagish Lake, but in the middle of winter, and there happened to be just enough snow to cushion the impact but not enough to bury the pieces completely.

And it remained cold and dry for several days afterward, with no snow.

Brook picked up what he could right then and there, and returned the next day to recover more.

But it snowed the following day.

He did return in the spring to recover more material after the snow had melted substantially but before the ice melted altogether, though those specimens are what he describes as water-damaged.

'It is kind of like a charcoal briquette, except it is more fragile, and it just disintegrates in water very quickly,' he told the Star.

Now that the Tagish Lake meteorite is the focus of active research, he plans to stay in touch with the university to learn more about what's it's discovering from his find.

Len Westerberg of Canada Heritage confirmed this morning the federal department contributed a grant of $437,000 to assist with the purchase.

It has been reported the total purchase price was $750,000.

Professor Christopher Herd, curator for the university's meteorite collection, said today that Brook was paid $1,000 per gram, or a total of $850,000.

Not only was the meteor rare in its origins, but equally significant said Herd was the method in which Brook handled it and stored it. The material has literally given researchers an opporunity to examine meteorite material that is in pristine condition, uncontaminiated from organic skin matter and such, he pointed out.

'And this could not have happened to a better meteorite,' Herd said.