The Desert Fireball Network in Australia is a system of cameras that monitor the night sky looking for fireballs. The network ensures that several cameras view every region of the sky so that the trajectory of the incoming rock can be triangulated with reasonable accuracy.
When the Network detects a fireball, it is straightforward to work out the location of the meteorite landing site to within a few square kilometers. A team of astronomers is then dispatched to find it.
And therein lies the problem. A ground search over several square kilometers is time consuming and laborious. It usually consists of four to six people walking between five and ten meters apart who scour the area over a 4-day period until they find the culprit.
Even then, the success rate is low. ”[This approach] suffered from a relatively low success rate of ~20%, since an entire fall zone could rarely ...
