A dazzling meteor that lit up WA’s skies on Mother’s Day was the spark for Curtin University’s Desert Fireball Network (DFN) to embark on an exciting journey deep into the Australian Outback, to discover where the space rock landed – and where it may have come from.

The DFN, supported by Curtin’s Space Science and Technology Centre (SSTC), used high-tech weather modelling and its network of cameras to calculate where the meteorite crashed into Earth’s surface.

The team tracked the meteorite to the Wheatbelt region of WA, believing it to have landed in the remote salt flats of Lake Hope, 530km east of Perth.

That sparked an adventure requiring hundreds of kilometres behind the wheel, hours of off-road four-wheel-driving, a night spent camping under the stars and a seven-kilometre trek by foot.

Pointed to the area by landing prediction coordinates published on the DFN website, a member of the public, Marcus Scott, discovered the first piece of the meteorite while DFN director Eleanor Sansom was in the sky over the lake with pilots Ondra Lorenz and Daniel Smith assisting in an aerial search for more impacts.

Using a farming app to provide a search grid and GPS navigation, the team spotted another two potential meteorite crash sites in the lake. These sites turned out to be spot-on, directly leading Curtin’s Dr Hadrien Devillepoix and Mia Walker to two more rocks only a few days later. Those rocks had partially sunk into the lake’s muddy surface, which meant they were fully intact with a black fusion crust exterior.

These extremely ‘fresh’ samples – located mere days after arrival instead of thousands of years later – are now being analysed by planetary scientists at Curtin’s SSTC to determine what type of meteorites they are, and where in space they came from.

Congratulations to all the researchers involved in making this out-of-this-world discovery! You can watch a TV story about this remarkable find here.