NCIE
NCIE
Australian scientists use drones and artificial intelligence to hunt for meteorites and its surrounding areas
Seamus-Anderson and his colleagues at Curtin University in Australia report the discovery of a meteorite in the remote Australian outback that once orbited Venus and Jupiter in an elliptical orbit, using two Drones and machine learning methods found the meteorite.
Based in Perth, Curtin University’s Space Technology Centre operates the Desert Fireball Network, a system of 50 automated cameras that monitors Australia’s night sky for meteors. One nightr, two of the cameras tracked a streak in the sky, and the system calculated that a small rock might have fallen in the desert scrub of Western Australia, in an area known as Nullarbor.
The observations weren’t ideal, with the researchers estimating the meteorite weighed between 150 and 700 grams and fell in an area of 5 square kilometers, but Anderson and two colleagues decided to conduct a field trip. In December, they drove more than 1,000km from Perth to find a needle in the haystack: a blackened rock on the desert floor, 50km from the nearest paved road. In the past, such travel was pointless. Meteorite hunters typically search the ground on foot, walking back and forth in a grid pattern, hoping they’ll find something useful. Eighty percent of the time, they fail. It turns out that humans are not very good at handling this repetitive work.
