UKFall - The UK Fireball Alliance

The UK Fireball Alliance aims to recover freshly-fallen meteorites in the UK.  Led by staff of the Open University and London's Natural History Museum, UKFall is a collaboration between the UK’s meteor camera networks.

 

The Science

  • About 65,000 meteorites have been found world-wide

  • Only about 40 of these 65,000 were photographed as they arrived as a fireball

  • Meteor camera networks photograph incoming meteors from multiple locations

  • That allows the meteor’s path through the atmosphere to be calculated accurately

  • From this, the meteorite’s likely landing point can be estimated

  • This helps us find it before it gets rained on or very contaminated

  • The object’s orbit before hitting the Earth can also be calculated.

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  • So, we have a freshly-recovered object and we know where in the solar system it came from; a really powerful combination that helps us understand the solar system.

  • Also, the meteorite’s hardness, strength, density and composition can be compared with its path through the atmosphere to learn more about the physics of meteorite and comet impacts. 

 

The People

UK-based members of the UKFall team include the coordinators of each of the UK fireball camera networks, plus academic staff of UK institutions involved in space science, geology or in the study and curation of meteorites.

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Overseas members include the coordinators of some of the international fireball networks and specialists in trajectory, orbit and strewn field calculations.

 

The Camera Networks

The participating UK meteor camera networks are:

 

Sign up to be notified

Want to join in a UK meteorite hunt?  We'll need a team to hunt for the rocks.  Your help would be much appreciated.

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Sign up here to be notified when we think there's a meteorite to find. Your contact details will only be used for this purpose.

 

Or send us a message

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© 2019-2020 by UKFall - The UK Fireball Alliance.