Fireballs and Meteorites: Inside the Desert Fireball Network with Dr Hadrien Devillepoix
A Man of Many Hats
From time to time, I still get lost, even with Google. Even once I was sure I was in the correct location, my interview subject was not there. I worried until a casual young man sauntered into the room, parking his bike between two desks – there was a Doctor in the house. Dr. Hadrien Devillepoix wears several hats at the Desert Fireball Network, but two stand out. One is his role as a PhD supervisor, where he mentors students on planetary science, meteoroid tracking and fireball data analysis. The other is his role as Science Lead, where he oversees the DFN’s mission to track fireballs across the globe, recover meteorites and trace their origins back to specific regions in space, helping unlock the secrets of our Solar System.
Guiding Minds
Hadrien supervises several PhD candidates who are budding planetary scientists, and I have been fortunate enough to interview some of them. Each student is brilliant in their breadth of knowledge on asteroids, meteoroids and meteorites. The students bring their passion and intelligence, but it is the Doctor who guides them and finds himself guided by them, as their supervisor. ‘It’s a bit scary at first. You want to make sure you’ve got a decent project for them; you’re going to be supporting them enough. But it’s also really good fun. During a career, you get busy with a lot of things, admin things, so it’s our PhD students that make sure a lot of the science happens!’
It’s a bit scary at first. […] But it’s also really good fun.
First Light
The DFN and Global Fireball Observatory (GFO) track fireballs with remote camera systems. This helps scientists to determine where meteors come from in the solar system and recover fallen meteorites. This is another important part of Hadrien’s remit at Curtin’s Space Science and Technology Centre.
‘I’m the first to look at data from our observatories, which capture fireball images all night.’ The DFN cameras take photographs of the night sky every 30 seconds, meaning there can be up to 1200 images in a day. That’s a lot of data. It’s the Doctor’s job to parse through all that data to extract what is meaningful from what isn’t. ‘You might see an image that’s particularly interesting and you dive into it, spending the whole morning or even the day on this one meteorite.’
Trawling for Rocks
The DFN team is interdisciplinary, consisting of researchers, engineers, software programmers, and student planetary scientists. Each person contributes something to the story, and Hadrien coordinates their science efforts. The team also uses artificial intelligence (AI) to identify and categorize fireballs and objects of interest, and automating this process makes the scientists’ jobs easier. This is important when you consider how many photographs worth of data that the Doctor needs to trawl through!
However, there are drawbacks to this. ‘You’re going to train those computers to look for stuff you’re interested in, but that means you’re also going to miss all the stuff you don’t know about. They’ll only be trained for what you’ve already got data on. Say there’s something unusual you don’t have data on, or there is no data on, you’re not going to see that even though it’s there.’ In other words, the camera can capture the image, but if the AI doesn’t recognise what it is looking at, the AI won’t see the new object.
Paydirt
Sunday, 18 May 2025, ‘Mother’s Day’: A meteoroid blasts into the atmosphere over Western Australia, lighting up the sky, leaving a trail of fire behind it as evidence of its path. Back in sleepy Perth, the DFN team remains blissfully unaware until…‘I didn’t check the camera detection system before I left home for a mountain bike ride. So my phone started ringing when I was in the middle of nowhere.’ Hadrien made it home, calculated the landing zone for the meteorite, and the DFN team made the call to publish the results on their website in case any members of the public could ‘go and find a rock about the size of two hands in 50 square kilometers.’
The weekend after the event, the DFN team flew in a plane over the predicted meteorite landing area, which was peppered with salt lakes. ‘The problem goes from finding something dark in the bush to finding something dark on a salt lake. We spotted some splashes.’ However, it wasn’t the team that found that first meteorite from that location – it was a member of the public who had seen the DFN website!
Rehoming Meteorites
I glance upon a meme, taped with pride on a protruding bookshelf in the office. This meme explains that meteorites must be returned to an observatory, which is a place where people take injured meteorites so that they can be returned to the wild by scientists. The meme makes me giggle. It isn’t exactly what the Desert Fireball Network does, but maybe it is close enough. The good Doctor must attend to his busy schedule, so I thank him for his time and allow him to get back to rehoming meteorites (amongst many other things!).
Written by Louise Kaestner, 2025. For more, visit LinkedIn or head to her website: https://www.louisekaestnerwriter.com/