Search is on for meteor in North
Footage could unlock site
Meteor hunters crunching the angles on the fireball that shot across the Far North sky are preparing for an outback recovery mission after roughly pinpointing where the space rock could have landed.
Citizen scientists watched spellbound as a meteor shot through the sky travelling at an estimated speed of 150,000km/ h on Saturday night.
Captured on security cameras, dashcams and by photography buffs from Weipa to Townsville, the rock likely between 0.5 and 1m in size had enthusiasts buzzing about a unique chance to get their hands on a potentially valuable out-of-this-world relic.
Though most meteorites are worth between $5 and $10 per gram, the Murchison meteorite that fell in country Victoria in 1969 was rich in amino acids and aromatic hydrocarbons – the very building blocks of life – and fragments could fetch several hundred to a thousands of dollars per gram.
But creator of the Australian Meteor Reports Facebook group and search co-ordinator David Finlay said finding the space rock was not about getting rich.
“The main goal is for scientific research,” he said.
Mr Finlay said another of the page’s admins, geologist Ray Pickard from the Bathurst Observatory, had been tasked with triangulating the impact zone by measuring the angle of the meteor’s trajectory from dozens of videos.
“We hopefully can get camera viewpoints from a whole heap of locations, and different
angles will give us the ability to collate data and narrow down the points of impact,” he said.
With no official government body tasked to find the meteorite, Mr Finlay said if the rock landed on public land it was fair game, but said “there is not much of a market for these things because there’s a federal law that prohibits them being shipped offshore”.
Townsville-based James Cook University geoscientist and geochemist Dr Alex Mccoy-west was excited about the possibility of a rare meteorite falling in his backyard but he warned finding it would be like looking for a needle in a haystack.
“It could be something spectacular, it could be a really cool meteorite called a pallasite, which are a mix of stone and iron meteorites,” he said.
“It’s going to be quite small so there will be no crater, it will be an iron rock so if you do find it, it will be quite heavy.”
He said the rock would most likely be a chondrite meteorite made up of dust, rubble and presolar grains but if it turned out to be an achondrite, the rock had the potential to “provide new insights into the formation of the solar system”.