There's a new contender for best job title ever - Scientist for the Desert Fireball Network.
Curtin University's DFN is a ragtag gang of dedicated scientists who scan the skies looking for the telltale flames of meteorites burning through the earth's atmosphere.
Members of Curtin University's Desert Fireball Network team have tracked and recovered a freshly fallen meteorite from a WA farm near Morawa.
Every so often a fragment of these space invaders makes it intact to earth - and the DFN scrambles to find it, using a network of more than fifty cameras fitted with fish eye lenses arrayed across Australia's remote areas.
These cameras follow the meteorite from entry to impact, and are driven by advanced algorithms that allow them to identify fireballs and track them.
Now, it's been revealed that a team of DFN scientists has successfully tracked and quickly recovered a freshly fallen meteorite that blazed through WA's skies over Halloween on October 31.
The 1.15kg meteorite, shaped like a squished brick, fell to earth in farmland near Morawa in the state’s Mid West region, several hundred kilometres north-east of Perth.
DFN founder Professor Phil Bland said a report of meteorites in the night sky by Stargazers Club of WA founder Carol Redford – also known as 'Galaxy Girl' – set the team checking its network of outback cameras.
"The fireball was picked up by four of our cameras – in Perenjori, Northam, Badgingarra and Hyden," Professor Bland said.
"Perenjori provided the best information, and with the information from Northam and Badgingarra our team was able to track the fall line and calculate its landing spot to within 200m of where it was subsequently found."
The fragment was located and recovered within a week, a swift outcome that has huge scientific value because the meteorite has had minimal contamination from the elements.
Professor Bland said this quick work has proved that the DFN works and offers extraordinary scientific value.
"We found a meteorite at Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre in South Australia on New year's Eve, and that was a great achievement. But to find this one in WA so quickly has show how far we've come with the network," he said.
"The Australian outback offers remarkable opportunities to track and find meteorites quickly. This really is proof of concept for us and it's very exciting to be able to see the fireball, triangulate the impact zone and then go out and recover it swiftly."
Dr Martin Towner from Curtin's Department of Applied Geology visited the site in Morawa in early November to obtain permission to enter local farms and hunt down the meteorite.
With permission granted, Dr Towner returned to the area with fellow team members Trent Jansen-Sturgeon, Ben Hartig and Hadrien Devillepoix to scour the ground.
"We left Perth early in the morning, arriving at the farms to search in the afternoon," Dr Towner said.
"We didn't know it at the time, but we were in the right field, within 500 metres of the fall site."
"We started on Monday in a different field, travelling on mountain bike and on foot but had no luck and decided to head back to the field from the day before to complete that quadrant.
"Within half a kilometre, and before we'd even had lunch, we found the rock – a pristine, unweathered, fresh sample."
The 1.15kg meteorite is dwarfed by WA's most famous space fragment, the 1911 Mundrabilla meteorite, whose main mass of iron ore weighs in at over nine tonnes.
But the fact this new meteorite in Morawa was recovered so swiftly opens up a new world of scientific possibility, and Professor Bland said the DFN is itching to know more about it.
"It's bonkers. I find it very difficult to believe sometimes that this is my job.
"A colleague has already done a CT scan on the new meteorite and we can't wait to look at it more closely and see what we find."
Under Federal Government law, the meteorite belongs to the state, and the Trustees of the Western Australian Museum will become the custodians.
And rest assured, when it comes to the skies, the Desert Fireball Network will be watching...
