Scientists train drone to hunt for meteorites that have crashed to Earth

Researchers have trained a drone to search for asteroids that crash to Earth. The drones autonomously fly in a grid pattern, taking photos of the ground over a large area, and use artificial intelligence to search through the pictures to identify potential meteorites. Every year approximately 500 meteorites fall to the planet's surface, but less than two per cent of these are ever recovered – sometimes because they fall in inaccessible locations, such as the ocean, but in other instances simply because they are not found in time. The drone, developed by the University of California, Davis, has been tested around Walker Lake in Vegada, where a meteorite fell in 2019. "Images can be analyzed using a machine-learning classifier to identify meteorites in the field among many other features," said Robert Citron, a postdoctoral researcher at the university.