Led by Dr Ellie Sansom and Dr Hadrien Devillepoix, the Desert Fireball Network (DFN) is a network of over 50 autonomous digital optical observatories that continually monitor 3 million square km of the night sky, capturing the paths of fireballs in the sky, triangulating trajectories from multiple viewpoints, and linking the rock’s pre-Earth orbit to its landing site prediction.
We recover meteorites by a combination of manual and drone / machine learning assisted fieldwork. Together with partners across the world, the DFN has expanded to become a Global Fireball Observatory (GFO) with stations internationally to observe these phenomena.
The DFN is a collaboration with the Curtin Institute of Radio Astronomy (CIRA). Observations made by the DFN and GFO are relevant to space situational awareness and planetary defence.
