Wed 7th November @ noon, Rm 312.222
Abstract:
The Desert Fireball Network (DFN) is a continental scale facility dedicated to observing meteorite dropping events. The DFN is expanding overseas to become part of the Global Fireball Observatory (GFO), with partnerships established with 14 other institutions, and cameras already deployed and running in the USA, Canada, UK and Morocco.
The DFN alone, over its 3 million km2 viewing area observes ~1.5 fireballs every night brighter than -1.5 mag. Reducing these data has produced a set of over 1000 fireball orbits. The Global Fireball Observatory already generates 4.5TB of data per night, managed by the small team here at Curtin. Mass modelling of these events is ongoing, though it is estimated that there are multiple candidates that could have resulted in a meteorite on the ground. The observation and recovery of the latest meteorites will be discussed.
Recent development of the FireOPAL systems in partnership with Lockheed Martin is also providing a unique imaging observatory for SSA satellite and debris tracking.
Short bio:
Dr. Eleanor Sansom completed her undergraduate and masters degree in geophysics at Imperial College London. She joined the Desert Fireball Network team in Perth, Australia in December 2012 and completed her PhD. in early 2017 after developing novel techniques for determining the masses of fireball meteoroids. Eleanor is currently the Desert Fireball Network Science Lead and continues to increase the accuracy of the team’s predictions of where meteorites may have fallen, as well as diving into the large orbital dataset being produced by the DFN – a mine of information including mass flux of incoming material and can provide information on asteroid families for impact hazard mitigation.
