1/30/2024 0 Comments Finetune bennu hitting earth![]() When the meteor whizzed by, glass didn’t just shatter, observers told him, it turned into spray. Jenniskens traveled to the site in the months after the impact to participate in a Russian Academy of Science field study of the meteorite’s impact. In 2013, the Chelyabinsk meteor hit Russia, causing the hospitalization of more than a thousand people ( 4). That tracking can also, potentially, have real consequences on the ground. Tracking and forecasting meteor impacts helps ensure the safety of spacecraft and astronauts ( 3). These showers are captured in a stunning visualization on the SETI website (see Already, the creation of meteor shower maps, built upon the observations from networks like CAMS and DFN, has helped astronomers make predictions about when meteor showers will occur. By early September, the meteors were radiating from the constellation Camelopardalis. But when the meteors first appear in early July, the camera network detected them in Cassiopeia. The well-known Perseid shower, for example, radiates from the constellation of Perseus during the meteor showers’ mid-August peak ( 2). Surprising findings from CAMS suggest that meteor showers can shift the point in the sky that they radiate from can change. Low-light video cameras have been a boon for observers, he says. “When I was an amateur 20 years ago, looking at the night sky, there was really no understanding of what was going on,” Jenniskens says, recalling his use of pen and paper to plot the tracks with star charts. “You film the meteors that appear and you do that from two or more sites, triangulate the track, and determine from where the meteors are coming and at what speed.”īig strides have been made in the field in recent years. “It’s basically video surveillance of the night sky,” says Jenniskens. The network has also discovered more than 100 new showers, with more waiting to be confirmed ( 1). Nearly 5-years-old, the CAMS network has provided the first overview of which meteor streams hit the Earth throughout the year. The network’s 263 cameras are positioned in California in the United States, as well as Belgium, the Netherlands, the United Arab Emirates, and several other nations. Others, such as the Cameras for Allsky Meteor Survey (CAMS), curated by Peter Jenniskens of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute and sponsored by NASA, focus on searches for new meteor showers and trace them to their original orbits. Some, like Bland’s, are meant to spot and help scientists recover fallen meteorites. Other meteor-spotting networks opt for a different emphasis. If the DFN team receives enough information, they let users know where the rock they sighted originated in the solar system. If a sighting is corroborated by multiple users, researchers check to confirm the reports. The DFN team uses the information to track where the rock may have come from and may have fallen to Earth. Options allow users to “fine-tune” the appearance of the fireball, its brightness, duration, shape, and color, and to note whether they heard a sonic boom. ![]() According to the project’s website, more than 26,000 people in 88 countries have downloaded the app “Fireballs in the Sky.” Users point their phones to the place in the sky where they saw a fireball start, tap to start the trail, trace the path until the point in the sky where they saw the fireball disappear, and tap again. To help achieve a high-resolution view of the skies, the network also enlists citizen scientists. The project is a collaboration between Imperial College London, Ondrejov Observatory in the Czech Republic, Curtin University in Western Australia, and the Western Australian Museum. Waterproof containers help the cameras survive the Australian outback inbuilt fans keep the cameras cool through the day. The DFN consists of 52 autonomous digital cameras placed in the hot, dry Nullarbor desert, with another dozen cameras scattered in multiple countries. Those participating in these networks are photographing, tracking, and hunting down meteorites. Bland and others want to map out the paths of space rocks by determining precise orbits, and gleaning which asteroids or near-earth region of space from which the rocks emanate.
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