Meteorites offer tantalizing clues about what the early solar system was like. But finding them is far from rocket science. Often, researchers simply fan out across a landscape and walk for hours while staring at the ground. Now, some scientists are turning to drones and machine learning to help spot freshly fallen meteorites much more efficiently.
A team of six people on a meteorite-hunting expedition can search about 200,000 square meters per day, says Seamus Anderson, a planetary scientist at Curtin University in Perth, Australia. But since the area over which a cluster of meteorites falls typically can’t be pinpointed to better than a few million square meters, searching can take a while, he says. “It’s quite slow.”
Around 2016, Anderson began toying with the concept of using drones to take pictures of the ground to look for meteorites. That idea blossomed into a Ph.D. project. In 2022, he and his colleagues reported their first successful recovery of a meteorite spotted with a drone. They’ve since found four more meteorites at a different site, the team reported August 17 in Los Angeles at a meeting of the Meteoritical Society.
Drone-based searches are much faster than the standard way of doing things, Anderson says. “You’re going from about 300 days of human effort down to about a dozen or so.” It’s also fun and exciting work, he says, but there are challenges too.
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