Curtin researchers have recovered a freshly fallen meteorite after pinpointing its exact location on the vast Nullarbor Plain in Western Australia, with a new technique that uses a drone to collect footage of the landscape that is then scanned using artificial intelligence.
Lead researcher, graduate student Seamus Anderson from Curtin’s Space Science and Technology Centre (SSTC), said the find at Kybo Station late last year was a successful demonstration of the new method, which had the potential to greatly increase the number of recovered meteorites, particularly those observed as they fall through the atmosphere.
“A camera-fitted drone flies over and collects images of the fall zone, which are transferred to our field computer where an algorithm scans each image for meteorites and features that resemble them,” Mr. Anderson said.
“Although our algorithm was ‘trained’ on data collected from past meteorite searches, we brought with us previously recovered meteorites and imaged them on the ground at the fall site, to create local data with which to further train the algorithm.
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