Unfortunately for all of us, the Universe is not a friendly place as we like to believe or as we’ve been told. Meteors fly through the Earth’s atmosphere all the time, and there’s no wonder why a really big one can pay us a visit.
Air friction is on our side, thankfully. Most space rocks that go through our atmosphere will get obliterated due to air friction and their high speed. But even if some meteors aren’t big enough to cause damage and neither are they too small to get completely destroyed, some of their remnants can be found by researchers.
Drone finds meteorite that crashed in Australia
According to UniverseToday.com, a recent meteorite crashed into Australian soil and was found by a drone. Luckily, the space rock is too small to have been able to pose a threat to our planet. A team from Curtin University in the country was responsible for the discovery. It took them just four days to find the meteorite, while they had been using an observational system known as the Desert Fireball Network (DFN), to be more precise.
The researchers explained, as quoted by Astronomy.com:
We used a DJI M300 drone with a Zenmuse P1 camera (44 MP) to survey the 5.1 km2 fall line at 1.8 mm/pixel with 20% overlap among images in each direction.
The journey was more demanding than we might think. Here’s another official statement that says it all, as quoted by the same source:
The first three days we spent onsite consisted of surveying with a drone, and processing data with our machine learning algorithm,
On the fourth and final day we visited meteorite candidates with the drone and in person.
Just in case, NASA is constantly monitoring the skies for any possible space rock that’s too big and might approach us.