List:
Now this sounds interesting.
Greg S.
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-03/16/nasa-fireball-network
US space agency Nasa is planning to cover the United States with cameras facing
upward to track meteorites as they enter the atmosphere.
The scheme, which has been named the "All-sky Fireball Network" will allow
researchers to triangulate observations of space rocks to try and figure out
where they're going to land, making them easier to recover. It's entirely
automated -- computers scan the images received to try and work out which
objects are meteors, and then send any positive results to Nasa, which puts
them on the web.
The network currently consists of just three cameras -- in the US states of
Alabama, Georgia and Tennessee. Nasa's William Cooke, head of the agency's
Meteoroid Environment Office, hopes to expand that to 15 cameras across the
eastern half of the US, and is talking to schools, planetariums and science
centres to host them. "If someone calls me and asks 'What was that?' I'll be
able to tell them," he told Singularity Hub.
Other meteorite monitoring systems exist, particularly over the less-populated
western half of the US, but the Fireball Network is the first that's completely
automated, using optical recognition technology to identify the flaming
signature of a meteorite burning up in the atmosphere (or the occasional
spider). Eventually, it's hoped that the various meteor-monitoring networks
could link up to cover the whole country.
It's not a warning system -- once a meteor is detected it'll likely be too late
to alert any nearby residents. But data from the Fireball Network will be used
to improve the shielding used on spacecraft, as well as being kept as a record
of every large meteoroid to burn up over the US. It'll also help researchers
track more of them down.
One of Cooke's assistants told Nasa's Science News: "Most meteorites fall in
the ocean, lakes, forests, farmer's fields, or the Antarctic…and the majority
of those meteorites will never be found. But our system will help us track down
more of them."
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