Catch a Meteor

“Catch a Meteor” iPhone Meteor Tracker

a POC:

i Lee Graham, lee.d.graham@nasa.gov, 281.244.5192

ii Paul Abel, paul.a.abell@nasa.gov, 281.483.0293

iii Joel Parker, joel.j.k.parker@nasa.gov

b Background:

iv Each year, millions of observable, unexpected meteors encounter the Earth's atmosphere and become a spectacle to the population below. Many of the brighter "shooting stars" actually reach the surface of the Earth, becoming "metorites", encapsulating secrets of our universe in their charred remains.

v These meteorites are very small and often break into even smaller pieces before landing in remote areas, hiding in plain sight as the moisture of Earth's atmosphere degrades them. Before long they are of no use to scientists, since they are physically no different than much of Earth's rocky soil, making any scientific findings very hard to validate.

vi Individuals see meteors (“shooting stars”) quite often, but finding any resulting meteorite on the ground is difficult.

vii By crowd-sourcing meteor detection with common smartphone cameras, it should be possible to model the trajectory of the meteor and predict within a small region where the impact (if any) occurred.

c Challenge Description:

viii The key is to find the meteors quickly. At the core of this challenge is to create a mobile app which would allow observers of a meteor shower to trace where they saw a shooting star, rate its color, size, or even possibly sound. A central server would then aggregate this data, combined with locational and timestamp information captured by the smartphone or tablet, and quickly converge on a small area of land which could be searched for signs and possible recovery of larger meteors which may have landed and become meteorites.

ix The secondary goal of this app would be to support and augment an interested community of meteor observers, who might be called upon to observe any possibly predicted,...