Successful Recovery of an Observed Meteorite Fall Using Drones and Machine Learning

Some of these meteorites fall in regions on Earth where fireball observatory networks are active, making it possible to record the trajectory of the fireball as it ablates material from the originating meteoroid. For some fireballs, this data can then be used to simulate both forward and backward in time to predict where the resulting meteorite landed on Earth and where the meteoroid originated in the solar system. Thus, recovering and analyzing these'orbital meteorites' with constrained, prior orbits provides an incredibly unique insight into the geology of the asteroid belt and the nature of mass transfer between the belt and the inner solar system. The Desert Fireball Network (DFN) (Bland et al. 2012; Howie et al. 2017) is one of many organizations (Oberst et al. 1998; Spurný et al. 2006; Trigo-Rodríguez et al. 2006; Olech et al. 2006; Colas et al. 2015; Devillepoix et al. 2020) that makes this possible.