Science can be comforting when things work. You look at your data, you run the math, and boom – things are predicted that you can verify. 

One extremely satisfying experiment that is currently taking place in Australia is the Desert Fireball Network. In this program, individuals throughout the Outback have cameras pointed at the sky looking for meteors streaking through. When multiple cameras catch the same streak, it can become possible to calculate where any meteorite fragments may be located and to work backward and calculate the orbit the meteoroid was on prior to having its passage blocked by the Earth. 

Researchers from Curtin University recently went through images, headed out, and were able to recover debris from two separate meteor falls, one freshly observed and the other from November 2019. They recovered a stunning fist-sized 1.1-kilogram meteorite as well as a smaller 0.3-kilogram meteorite. This ability to see a streak, run the calculations and go find the specific rocks that fell out of the sky in the vastness of Australia’s deserts is pleasing. 

More Information

Curtin University press release