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Meteor may appear on film
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,17464899-39555,00.html December 05, 2005
WESTERN Australia's chief meteorite expert is hopeful a prototype camera network
will help him track down a meteor which lit up the skies of WA over the weekend.
Astronomers believe the meteorite, flashing brightly and sending out sonic
booms, smashed into the earth's atmosphere about 300km southeast of Perth at
8.47pm (WST) Saturday. The spectacle was reported in WA's north, as far east as
Kalgoorlie - nearly 500km from Perth - and in the south at Albany, more than
400km from the capital.

While thousands of people reported seeing and hearing the meteor fly overhead,
authorities have little idea where it landed, with thousands of square
kilometres of West Australian territory virtually uninhabited. Despite the lack
of witnesses, Dr Alex Bevan, curator of meteorology at Western Australian
Museum, has high hopes that an experimental horizon-wide camera network will
help him pinpoint the meteorite's landing zone.

"I would go and look for it right now, but I wouldn't have any idea where to
start," Dr Bevan said. "Western Australia is a huge place. Even if we narrowed
it down to an area of five square kilometres, it would take me three weeks to
search it." The answer may lie with an experimental camera system currently
being installed on the Nullabor Plain. A joint project between WA Museum,
London's Imperial College and a similar project in the Czech Republic, the
cameras have been successfully trialled for the past 18 months in WA's eastern
goldfields. Each night the camera exposes a plate that takes a picture of the
heavens from horizon to horizon. Dr Bevan said if the cameras had been assembled
in time, there is a chance the meteor was caught on film, and its crash zone
could be found by combining the data from the three cameras.

"Each plate is a record of what happens each night - we would be able to work
out the velocity, direction and possible landing zone of the meteor," Dr Bevan
said. Even if a landing site could be determined, the odds aren't high that the
meteorite could be found. After all, unless you see it hit the ground, a
meteorite looks like just another rock. "Meteorites can lose 80% of their mass
upon hitting the Earth's atmosphere," Dr Bevan said. "The fireball produced is
much bigger than the meteorite, but even though it can be quite frightening,
this was not a crater-producing event." Dr Bevan says more than 7000
"recoverable" meteorites fall to Earth each year. If everything goes to plan, Dr
Bevan hopes to go hunting for the meteorite sometime next week.

Forwarded by Dr.BHUDIA-Science Group Of INDIA.
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