Fire in the sky!
Dr Ellie Sansom and Dr Hadrien Devillepoix lead the Desert Fireball Network (DFN). This network is made up of over 50 self-operating cameras. These cameras monitor 3 million square km of the night sky, allowing them to capture the paths of fireballs in the sky. As the cameras are covering the sky from multiple locations this allows them to triangulate and reverse engineer the fireball’s path. This allows observers to work out where the fireball landed.
We recover meteorites through a combination of manual, drone and machine-learning-assisted fieldwork. The DFN has expanded to become a Global Fireball Observatory (GFO) through worldwide collaboration and partnerships. There are now cameras placed across the globe to observe fireballs.
The DFN is a collaboration with the Curtin Institute of Radio Astronomy (CIRA). The DFN and GFO observations relevant to space situational awareness and planetary defence.
