(S. L. Anderson et al.)
Australian engineers tracked the fall of a meteorite to Earth for the first time and found its fragment four days later using a drone, not a search party.
Small space rocks constantly enter the earth's atmosphere, which usually simply burn up in the atmosphere, forming a "shooting star" in the sky.
Only a very small fraction of objects entering the atmosphere reach the Earth's surface.
The potentially bright flyby trail allows tracking of the impact area, which is typically several square kilometers in size.
But this task is complicated by several factors: most of the falls occur over the seas and sparsely populated areas,
Also, it takes a lot of time and human effort to search for small fragments in an area of several square kilometers.
Since drones can scan a large area much faster, scientists and engineers have been trying to use them to search for meteorites for years.
Now, a group led by Hadrien Devillepoix, spoke about the first successful discovery of a tracked meteorite using a drone.
They used a pair of drones: the first examines the alleged crash site, returns to the base to download images, and then the second flies to the points with the discovered candidate items.
If the images from the second drone confirm that the objects look like real meteorites, then only after that specialists are sent to the place.
After the first drone returns, the images are uploaded to a neural network computer developed by the group for the previous work.
The computer was trained to look for meteorites or similar rocks in photographs. To do this, the authors filmed 19 samples of meteorites taken from the museum in different places.
In December 2021, researchers were able to test the method in practice after a meteorite impact in the western part of the Nullarbor Plain in Australia.
On the fourth day, researchers found a small meteorite weighing 70 grams and about five centimeters in size in the calculated area of impact.
The authors have not yet had time to conduct a full-fledged analysis, but suggest that it belongs to the class of ordinary chondrites.
Source:
- 53rd Lunar and Planetary Science Conference: https://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2022/pdf/2013.pdf
- Phys.org: https://phys.org/news/2022-03-meteorite-australia-drone-scoured-area.html