Until 9.54PM on Sunday February 28 2021, the market town of Winchcombe in Gloucestershire was best known for things that happened a long time ago: its timber-framed buildings, the heritage steam railway, the nearby tomb of Catherine Parr. Then a fireball tore across the sky with a sonic boom.
The next day, the Wilcock family found something strange dashed across their Winchcombe driveway. It looked like charcoal. But it was a meteorite – a carbonaceous chondrite from near Jupiter. Mary McIntyre burst into tears when she heard. “I know how amazing that is,” she says. “I know how rare that is.”
McIntyre, who lives in north Oxfordshire, is one of around 100 people scattered across the country who are part of the UK Meteor Network (UKMON), a citizen science project dedicated to spotting and tracking meteorites. Within 24 hours of the fireball, they and a loose association of enthusiasts had helped scientists at the Natural History Museum recover the first meteorite in Britain for 30 years. “When you hold it, it seems to suck in colour – it looks as though it absorbs all of the light around it,” says Helena Bates, the museum’s interim meteorite curator. “It smells a little bit like coins, which is a bit gross.”
Bates was on the ground searching for any extra pieces of meteorite in nearby fields, and has studied the Winchcombe meteorite extensively. It wasn’t much to look at at first: just a sandwich bag filled with stones. But, says Bates, “it was extraordinary”.
The last time a meteorite was recovered in the UK, it was a complete accident. On Sunday, May 5, 1991, pensioner Arthur Pettifor was planting out an onion bed at home in Glatton, Cambridgeshire, when his conifer hedge suddenly shook. A lump of rock the size of a cricket ball had landed in his garden.
The three-decade-long meteorite drought isn’t due to a lack of space debris. Bates’ museum colleague Ashley King has said we could reasonably hope to recover one meteorite a year in the UK. Before the meteor networks, however, there were a lot of obstacles to finding them.
Our green and pleasant landscape doesn’t help. Bushes, woods, heathland and marshes are very difficult places to find small lumps of rock. The Australian meteor network’s first find was in the barren, featureless salt pan of Lake Eyre. “They were able to spot a 30 centimetre hole by flying a helicopter over,” says Jim Rowe, who set up the UK Fireball Alliance (UKFAll) in 2016. “But if you imagine doing that in Britain – I mean, you're going to be chasing every badger in Somerset.” It’s fortunate, then, that the Winchcombe meteorite landed on a suburban driveway: “If that landed in Scotland,” Rowe observes, “it would still be somewhere under a heather bush.”
Then there’s the fact we live on a set of small islands. Continental Europe is a much bigger target, and meteor networks and scientists from different countries can flag likely-looking fireballs to each other if it misses their own country. If a meteorite misses the British Isles, it’s lost. The ever-present threat of rain could ruin everything, too. A rock Rowe says is “a little more solid than Weetabix” would crumble, its chemistry completely changed.
The Winchcombe meteorite is particularly rare – only 51 carbonaceous chondrites have ever been recovered on Earth. “Without these camera networks, we would never have been able to find Winchcombe,” Bates says.
Every night, the 78 cameras of UKMON watch the skies for fireballs and meteors, and share images and video between its members. It’s not just a fun hobby, though. By sharing their data with universities and museums around the world, these amateur astronomers are changing what we know about the Solar System and our place in it, and they’re doing it with a kit that costs less than £200: a tiny camera about the size of a £2 coin, hooked up to Raspberry Pi and programmed in Python, mounted in a plastic housing on the outside of homes in Bideford, Cardiff, Rochdale and beyond.
The cameras detect and record bright moving objects in the sky, analyse their tracks and upload the data to a global cloud database. “It's very good at filtering out satellite trails, aircraft trails,” says McIntyre, who has a collection of 23 meteorites at home. “Not always so good at getting out bats and moths and spiders.”
No tech expertise is required, and McIntyre particularly likes the fact it’s “friendship-based”. More accomplished members – including McIntyre’s husband Mark, who’s regularly up coding until the small hours – help newbies set up and tweak their cameras.
UKMON is by far the biggest of the country’s six meteor networks, and is resolutely disorganised. “There's no formal structure – it's meant to be a little anarchist, it's meant to be chaotic. Because at the end of the day, it is a hobby,” says Richard Kacarek, who co-founded the organisation in 2012. “It shouldn't be a chore.”
Harnessing the energy of these groups falls to Rowe, who set up the UK Fireball Alliance (UKFAll) in 2016. He’d been fascinated by meteorites since wandering around the Canterbury Museum in Christchurch, New Zealand, as a boy. A fireball on St Patrick’s Day that year reignited his interest. Kacarek’s UKMON records meteors in the sky; Rowe’s UKFAll wants to find their remains on Earth, and is the link between the hobbyist networks, the professional networks and the professional scientists who analyse and curate any meteorite that’s found.
“We realised there were actually about five different networks in the UK [who] weren't aware of stuff that each other was catching, and also didn't really know what to do once we worked out a meteorite had fallen,” says Rowe. They weren’t even recording in the same file formats – though, after some lessons in Python from his daughter over lockdown, Rowe put together scripts so the networks could see each other’s recordings for the first time. Now, they’re all working together.
The Winchcombe success was built on frustrating near misses. “It was just people running around like headless chickens with no organisation,” says McIntyre. “It was such a missed opportunity.”
That disappointment turned out to be essential to finding Winchcombe. It spurred Rowe and UKFAll to make it easier to share data among a wider group of institutions more quickly to avoid bottlenecks, and inspired them put together a go-plan for the next event.
Even then, there were complications. A meteorite fall in France the day before was occupying most of the people who would have run their modelling systems. In Australia it was a public holiday, and UKFAll’s contact there discovered the supercomputer needed to calculate the meteorite’s path was in use when he returned from a windsurfing trip.
The meteor networks can add critical context to a meteorite. With more cameras, it’s easier to plot the trajectory and speed at which an object entered the atmosphere, and from there to calculate where in the Solar System it’s likely to have come from. The UKMON, along with international meteor networks in France, Australia and America, contributed critical extra data which pinpointed the Winchcombe meteorite’s luminous trajectory – its bright path through the sky as it burned up and burst into fragments – to within tens of metres.
“These meteorites came from bodies which formed very early on in the Solar System,” Bates says. “And not much has happened to them since then. So they're essentially like time capsules.” If you get to one quickly enough, you can age a meteorite using the isotopes present after it’s been bombarded with cosmic rays out in space. Winchcombe itself has been dated to around 4.6 billion years ago, and the very beginnings of the Solar System.
“But some of the atoms that we're interested in decay very, very, very quickly – they have a half life of a couple of weeks,” says Bates. That’s why the networks have become so important. Meteorites such as Winchcombe can be recovered in hours, and give clues as to how the planets formed, as well as hinting at our own origins too.
“We find things like fatty acids and amino acids – the building blocks of life,” Bates says. “And I find that fascinating, because this is something that formed very early in the solar system. Bodies like this have been flying around everywhere, impacting everything – does that mean that they are the building blocks of life everywhere? Is that what that means?”
Just by having an eye on the sky every single night, the cameras have caught meteor bursts outside of the traditional showers, when nobody expected so much activity. “It's not just the meteorites that fall,” says Bates. “They are monitoring basically all the influx of extraterrestrial material throughout the year, which is incredibly important for looking at mass distribution in the Solar System.”
The Winchcombe find sparked a rush of new members, and the hope for the rest of 2021 is to make it to 100 cameras on the UKMON and add more coverage in northern England, Scotland and Northern Ireland. “For me, we are now entering a completely new era,” Kacarek says. “What technology allows us to do is astonishing.”
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
