Back in 2024, the regional Global Meteor Network-enabled network, Fireball Aotearoa, tracked a brilliant fireball over New Zealand and we quickly reconstructed its trajectory and computed the meteorite strewn field.
Behold this most serious paper, in submission to Acta Prima Aprilia. A three-way collaboration with @sundogplanets.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy, myself & Laura Revell 🛰️🐄🤠🔭
Meteorite recovery, even in difficult and remote terrain, is now fast and scales well (find.gfo.rocks). Can't wait to see the analysis of this meteorite, and the many more to come; as we are slowly mapping the composition of the main asteroid belt. 9/9
Deliverance did not come until the third day, when Dale spotted the "most meteorite-y looking meteorite". This was the second to last candidate, the 727th. 8/X
And candidates there were: 31,153 of them! We narrowed these down the 728 that looked most promising. Iona, Michael, and Dale followed up every single one in the field. All of that in parallel of the drone survey+upload still happening. Most of them were gum nuts, very convincing candidates. 7/X
Thanks to support from the ADACS program @astroaustralia.bsky.social, over the past two years we have been developing a web platform to process the data and make sense of the deluge of drone data. Machine learning to detect black rocks, and crowdsourced help to review the meteorite candidates.
Once near the fall area they used a drone to take high-resolution pictures of the calculated fall area. First some training data for our meteorite object detector, and then the main survey: 10,818 pictures! They were continuously uploaded to the cloud (220GB of data over two days) via Starlink. 5/X
Then a crew of 3 PhD students from Curtin set up on an adventure. Getting there was not easy. The 1000km journey from Perth was on tracks getting smaller and smaller until they had to cut their own path through the bush. www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eJ9... 4/X
We computed its trajectory by triangulation using multiple images taken from different location. With a little help from our friend @meteordoc.bsky.social we determined the surviving mass, and predicted where the meteorite would have landed, to an area of 1.6km², deep in the Australian bush. 3/X
How did they do it you ask?
It all started 4 months ago when @dalegia.bsky.social 's prototype fireball camera sent this detection: bsky.app/profile/radc... 2/X
I think there is no better first bsky post than sharing the awesome outback adventure our PhD students went on. They found a space rock using a drone! 1/X
gfo.rocks/blog/2025/12...