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The Australian Desert Fireball Network: from natural impactors to space debris.

26/06/2026

Campus Paris-Rive-Gauche

14:00

Séminaires Planétologie et Sciences Spatiales

522, bât. Lamarck

Eleanor Sansom

Director of the Australian Desert Fireball Network and Global Fireball Observatory

The Desert Fireball Network detects and characterises fireballs across Australia through distributed optical observatories, linking recovered meteorites to their orbital origins, constraining the small body population in the inner solar system. Recently, we've been leveraging observations from complementary sensors, including doppler weather radar, satellite imagery, seismic, infrasound, and spectroscopy. These multi-sensor events can help to validate our methods. We're currently designing our next generation observatories, which will include high frame rate cameras, as well as infrasound sensors. Beyond natural objects, space debris re-entries provide an independent validation test case and address the urgent monitoring need for large-scale re-entry events. I'll compare our dynamical fragmentation modelling with infrasound-derived constraints and I'll discuss the imminent detection opportunities ahead.

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