Drones and AI help find pebble-sized meteorite that landed in 2021
Locating meteorites on Earth’s surface is like looking for a needle in a haystack, but using AI to analyse images captured by drones pinpointed a tiny space rock in just four days
Technology
11 March 2022
The meteorite as seen by the drone and algorithm: the yellow box is 100 square centimetres Anderson et al. (2022)
A meteorite has been successfully recovered using drones and a machine-learning algorithm for the first time. The development marks a step forward in improving the process of searching Earth’s surface for extraterrestrial rocks.
Typically, when a meteorite falls to Earth, it takes a team of five or more people to visually search the ground around the fall zone to find it. While the process can be successful, it is costly and time-consuming.
