Europlanet Science Congress 2021
Virtual meeting
13 – 24 September 2021
Europlanet Science Congress 2021
Virtual meeting
13 September – 24 September 2021
EPSC Abstracts
Vol. 15, EPSC2021-167, 2021
https://doi.org/10.5194/epsc2021-167
European Planetary Science Congress 2021
© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

The Australian Desert Fireball Network: overview and recent results

Martin Towner, Eleanor Sansom, Martin Cupak, Hadrien Devillepoix, Seamus Anderson, Patrick Shober, Robert Howie, Benjamin Hartig, and Phil Bland
Martin Towner et al.
  • SSTC, Curtin University, Perth, Australia

The Desert Fireball Network is a fireball observing network which stretches across the southern part of the Australian continent. To date, it has over 50 cameras, covering an area of approximately 2.5m km2. Its purpose is to observe and triangulate fireballs, calculate trajectories for incoming meteorites. The camera network has been operational in digital form since 2012, and to date as captured approximately 1.5PTB of data, primarily all sky images. We present an overview of the DFN results to date, detailing the dataset of approximately 1500 orbits, and over 30 possible candidate meteorite falls, and describe the most recent results. In particular, the team have recently recovered two candidate meteorites; one from the Nullarbor and one from the Simpson Desert in South Australia. The comparison the stories of these recoveries illustrate the typical issues of searching meteorite searching, and of verifying the meteorite’s provenance, and possible origin of the rocks is interesting to compare.

How to cite: Towner, M., Sansom, E., Cupak, M., Devillepoix, H., Anderson, S., Shober, P., Howie, R., Hartig, B., and Bland, P.: The Australian Desert Fireball Network: overview and recent results, European Planetary Science Congress 2021, online, 13–24 Sep 2021, EPSC2021-167, https://doi.org/10.5194/epsc2021-167, 2021.