Related papers: A Global Fireball Observatory
We report the first-time recovery of a fresh meteorite fall using a drone and a machine learning algorithm. A fireball on the 1st April 2021 was observed over Western Australia by the Desert Fireball Network, for which a fall area was…
Context: Until recently, camera networks designed for monitoring fireballs worldwide were not fully automated, implying that in case of a meteorite fall, the recovery campaign was rarely immediate. This was an important limiting factor as…
Based on telescopic observations of Jupiter-family comets (JFCs), there is predicted to be a paucity of objects at sub-kilometre sizes. However, several bright fireballs and some meteorites have been tenuously linked to the JFC population,…
The extraordinary weather conditions available between February and March 2022 over Spain have allowed us to analyze the brightest fireballs recorded by the monitoring stations of the Spanish Meteor Network (SPMN). We study the atmospheric…
Over the past decade there has been a large increase in the number of automated camera networks that monitor the sky for fireballs. One of the goals of these networks is to provide the necessary information for linking meteorites to their…
Meteorites with known orbital origins are key to our understanding of Solar System formation and the source of life on Earth. However, these pristine samples of space material are incredibly rare. Less than 40 of the 60,000 meteorites held…
The Earth is impacted by 35-40 metre-scale objects every year. These meteoroids are the low mass end of impactors that can do damage on the ground. Despite this they are very poorly surveyed and characterised, too infrequent for ground…
The population of Earth-impacting meteoroids and its size-dependent orbital elements are key to understanding the origin of meteorites and informing on planetary defence efforts. Outstanding questions include the role of collisions in…
The Global Meteor Network (GMN) utilizes highly sensitive low-cost CMOS video cameras which run open-source meteor detection software on Raspberry Pi computers. Currently, over 450 GMN cameras in 30 countries are deployed. The main goal of…
Various meteor and fireball networks exist worldwide. Most data sets which include ground-based observational data of meteors are affected by biases. The larger and faster the entering meteoroid, the brighter is the produced meteor. Hence,…
Meteoroids impacting the Earth on a daily basis are fragments of asteroids and comets. By studying fireballs produced during their disintegration in the atmosphere, we can gain information about their source regions and the properties of…
For centuries extremely-long grazing fireball displays have fascinated observers and inspired people to ponder about their origins. The Desert Fireball Network (DFN) is the largest single fireball network in the world, covering about one…
On Aug 22, 2016, a bright fireball was observed by the Desert Fireball Network in South Australia. Its pre-atmosphere orbit suggests it was temporarily captured by the Earth-Moon system before impact. A search was conducted two years after…
Meteoroids are pieces of asteroids and comets. They serve as unique probes to the physical and chemical properties of their parent bodies. We can derive some of these properties when meteoroids collide with the atmosphere of Earth and…
Fireball networks are used to recover meteorites, with the context of orbits. Observations from these networks cover the bright flight, where the meteoroid is luminescent, but to recover a fallen meteorite, these observations must often be…
Estimating the meteoroid flux density at centimetre to metre sizes is notoriously difficult. Yet it is an important endeavour, as these sizes represent the transition between small meteoroids that pose a risk to spacecraft, and the…
We present a cloud-based tool that uses drones and machine learning to help recover instrumentally observed meteorite falls. We showcase a collection of improvements made upon previous iterations of our system, as well as detail the…
Objects gravitationally captured by the Earth-Moon system are commonly called temporarily captured orbiters (TCOs), natural Earth satellites, or minimoons. TCOs are a crucially important subpopulation of near-Earth objects (NEOs) to…
Fireball observations from camera networks provide position and time information along the trajectory of a meteoroid that is transiting our atmosphere. The complete dynamical state of the meteoroid at each measured time can be estimated…
There is an unceasing incoming flux of extraterrestrial materials reaching the Earth's atmosphere. Some of these objects produce luminous columns when they ablate during the hypersonic encounter with air molecules. A few fireballs occur…