Meteorites, often known as fireballs, offer a unique window into the history of our solar system. The Desert Fireball Network (DFN) at Curtin University has established a national network of cameras that monitor approximately one third of Australian skies, leveraging advanced data processing techniques to help track down fireballs with the ultimate aim of recovery and analysis. Despite these advanced techniques, the DFN still face significant challenges tracking fireballs across nearly two thirds of the Australian sky, largely due to the enormity of the continent.

To address this limitation, The Australian Space Data Analysis Facility teamed up with Hadrien Devillepoix from the DFN to harness the capabilities of the geostationary weather satellites Himawari 8 and Himawari 9. These weather satellites image the entirety of the country every 10 minutes, effectively filling in the gaps of the fireball network.

The resulting project, titled “Meteor Entry Tracking using the Earth Observation Record (METEOR)” has created a powerful tool to automatically query and visualise himawari data at known fireball locations. These locations are drawn from the very rough locations provided by NASA’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies. Through successful observation of several dust trails ablated from known large fireballs, the METEOR project has yielded valuable geolocation and wind speed information to inform simulations of the final ground locations.