Eleanor K. Sansom

Characterising fireballs for mass determination: Steps toward automating the Australian desert fireball network

Determining the mass of a meteoroid passing through the Earths atmoshphere is essential to determining potential meteorite fall positions. This is only possible if the characteristics of these meteoroids, such as density and shape are in some way constrained. When a meteoroid falls through the atmosphere, it produces a bright fireball. Dedicated camera networks have been established to record these events with the objectives of calculating orbits and recovering meteorites. The Desert Fireball Network (DFN) is one of these programs and will eventually cover ~2 million km2. Automated observatories take high-resolution optical images throughout the night with the aim of tracking and recovering meteorites. From these optical images, the position, mass and velocity of the meteoroid at the end of its visible trajectory is required to predict the path to the ground. The method proposed here is a new aproach which aims to automate the process of mass determination for application to any trajectory dataset, be it optical or radio. Two stages are involved, beginning with a dynamic optimisation of unknown meteoroid characteristics followed by an extended Kalman filter. This second stage estimates meteoroid states (including position, velocity and mass) by applying a prediction and update approach to the raw data and making use of uncertainty models. This method has been applied to the Bunburra Rockhole dataset, and the terminal bright flight mass was determined to be 0.412 ±0.256 kg, which is close to the recovered mass of 338.9 g [1]. The optimal entry mass using this proposed method is 24.36 kg, which is consistent with other work based on the estabished photometric method and with cosmic ray analysis. The new method incorporates the scatter of the raw data as well as any potential fragmentation events and can form the basis for a fully automated method for characterising mass and velocity.

The Dingle Dell meteorite: A Halloween treat from the Main Belt

We describe the fall of the Dingle Dell (L/LL 5) meteorite near Morawa in Western Australia on October 31, 2016. The fireball was observed by six observatories of the Desert Fireball Network (DFN), a continental scale facility optimised to recover meteorites and calculate their pre-entry orbits. The

The desert fireball network: A sensor network for meteorite tracking and recovery

30\,\mbox{cm}

Advanced digital fireball observatories: Enabling the expansion of the desert fireball network

meteoroid entered at 15.44

A novel approach to fireball modeling: The observable and the calculated

\mbox{km s}^{-1}

How to build a continental scale fireball camera network

, followed a moderately steep trajectory of

Submillisecond fireball timing using de Bruijn timecodes

51^{\circ}

FILTERING METEOROID FLIGHTS USING MULTIPLE UNSCENTED KALMAN FILTERS

to the horizon from 81 km down to 19 km altitude, where the luminous flight ended at a speed of 3.2

Comparing Analytical and Numerical Approaches to Meteoroid Orbit Determination using Hayabusa Telemetry

\mbox{km s}^{-1}

Observation of metre-scale impactors by the Desert Fireball Network

. Deceleration data indicated one large fragment had made it to the ground. The four person search team recovered a 1.15 kg meteorite within 130 m of the predicted fall line, after 8 hours of searching, 6 days after the fall. Dingle Dell is the fourth meteorite recovered by the DFN in Australia, but the first before any rain had contaminated the sample. By numerical integration over 1 Ma, we show that Dingle Dell was most likely ejected from the main belt by the 3:1 mean-motion resonance with Jupiter, with only a marginal chance that it came from the