And it can be very tough to find meteorites in rough and complex terrain - such as a forest or swamp. Save for the euphoria of a find, meteorite hunts can be "really boring and monotonous in a lot of ways," Fries said.Īfter searching for low-hanging fruit, hunters often grid areas, walking back and forth for days to cover all the possible ground. A magnet, too, will stick to a meteorite. It’s hard to miss certain meteorite features, like their rounded shape and surprising weight, he added. ![]() "For the first one I found, I pretty much knew as soon as I saw it," Hankey said. Hankey, while walking along a sandy road, paused to stretch, and his eye caught a shimmering black stone against the dead grass and sand. The first find came on the second day of searching. So the team scoured dirt roads and sandy paths - anywhere a black space rock might be easy to spot. "In the first few days you want to go for low-hanging fruit," Hankey told. Within five days of the fall, Hankey drove from New York to Florida's Osceola National Forest, joining four others who were eager to begin the search. Nonetheless, news of the fall spread throughout the meteorite community like wildfire. They both pointed toward a swamp surrounded by pine forests - not the ideal hunting grounds. When Hankey shot Fries an email with the final location, the latter responded quickly with "SPOT-ON BULLSEYE!" Hankey’s computed trajectory perfectly intersected with the meteorite cloud Fries had found. To boot, radar has a high spatial resolution, allowing Fries and other researchers to compute almost exactly where each meteorite should have landed.įries and Hankey were working to pinpoint the meteorite's touchdown site as quickly as possible. That signature can be directly spotted in the radar data, he added. "So they're kind of like rifle bullets - they leave a turbulent wake behind them." ![]() "They're decelerating all the way down to the ground," Fries said. But radar instruments can also detect other falling objects - meteorites. Radar data is especially useful for meteorologists, because it spotlights rain and snow. While Hankey was parsing through 80 reports from eyewitness events of the fall, Fries himself was examining radar data. 24, Fries immediately called Mike Hankey, who's in charge of collecting reports on the AMS website and computing trajectories of meteors' paths. So after hearing rumors that a daytime fireball streaked across Florida's sunny skies around 10:30 a.m. The fact that they're so bright that they can be seen despite the sun's glare means that the objects that cause them are likely to be at least the size of a minivan, and some pieces therefore have a good chance of reaching the ground. Although fireballs occur every day, daytime fireballs tend to get scientists really excited.
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