Astronomers used dash and security cameras to find a fallen meteorite

A team of astronomers has used quite an unconventional way to trace the landing location of a meteorite that entered Earth's atmosphere. But if it isn't broken, don't fix it, right?

2

The team of astronomers worked on a paper that took all of the footage of a meteorite streaking across the sky over Slovenia, Croatia, Italy, Austria, and Hungary back in 2020. Dr. Denis Vida from the University of Western Ontario presented the paper at the Europlanet Science Congress (EPSC) 2021 and explained the team used a collection of video footage from several cameras around 62 miles apart.

Vida said, "By combining observations from several cameras around 100 kilometers apart, a fireball's position can be pinpointed to within 50 meters, and it's usually fairly easy to compute its atmospheric trajectory and pre-atmospheric orbit this way." The meteorite was estimated to be around four metric tonnes when it entered Earth's atmosphere, and as it plummeted towards the surface, it split up into at least seventeen individual pieces. Three of the pieces weigh 720 cams.

2

If you are interested in checking out the video footage from dashcams and security cameras for yourself, check out this link here.