UKFall - The UK Fireball Alliance
The UK Fireball Alliance aims to recover freshly-fallen meteorites in the UK. Led by staff of London's Natural History Museum, UKFall is a collaboration between the UK’s meteor camera networks.
The Science
About 60,000 meteorites have been found world-wide
Only about 30 of these 60,000 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.
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 are:
Dr Ashley King, Mineral and Planetary Sciences Division, Earth Sciences, the Natural History Museum
Dr Luke Daly, School of Geographical and Earth Sciences, University of Glasgow, and UK coordinator of the Desert Fireball Network
Sarah McMullan, PhD candidate, Imperial College London
Richard Kacereck, Founder, the UK Meteor Observation Network
Dr Jana Horák, Head of Mineralogy & Petrology, National Museum Wales
Dr Katherine Joy, Royal Society University Research Fellow / Senior Reader, School of Earth & Environmental Sciences, The University of Manchester
Dr Apostolos Christou, Armagh Observatory and Planetarium
Peter Campbell-Burns, Co-founder, the UK Meteor Observation Network
Jim Rowe , UK coordinator of the SCAMP fireball network
Overseas members are:
Dr Maria Gritsevich, Researcher, Docent at the Department of Physics, University of Helsinki
Denis Vida, PhD candidate, University of Western Ontario Department of Earth Sciences, and Coordinator of the Global Meteor Network.
The Camera Networks
The participating UK meteor camera networks are:
UK Meteor Observation Network www.ukmeteornetwork.co.uk
SCAMP, part of the French FRIPON network www.scamp.org.uk
Desert Fireball Network www.fireballsinthesky.com.au
Global Meteor Network www.globalmeteornetwork.org
