Who's ready to hunt for space rocks in Antarctica?
Collecting a meteorite on the Nansen blue ice area, close to the Belgian Antarctic research station Princess Elisabeth.Meteorites are the recordkeepers of our solar system. As parts of planetary bodies that have formed and evolved over literal eons, scientists can gain important cosmological insights from studying these fallen space rocks.
And researchers are confident that it will help conquer unexplored zones. “It has never been done on a continental scale and even on a local scale,” says Tollenaar and her team trained a machine learning algorithm to recognize 2,254 locations where researchers did find meteorites, and 2.1 million more where their existence was unknown. Then, they created an index that ranks MSZs according to the ease and success of a potential field visit.
To accurately map the continent and create predictions, the technique utilizes satellite-based data on Antarctica’s surface temperature, surface velocity, surface slope, and radar backscatter—which is when electromagnetic energy is reflected back to its source by the terrain. The team needed to account for these factors because when meteorites fall to the ground, they typically become trapped in Antarctica’s thick, snow-covered ice sheet, which covers about 98 percent of the entire continent.
According to Zekollari, who has visited Antarctica once before, exploratory expeditions can be difficult, but the scientific value of recovered meteorites is too invaluable to pass up. “A lot of the things that tell us about how old our solar system is, we really know them from meteorites.” says Zekollari.
An exceptionally large meteorite found on the Nansen blue ice area, close to the Belgian Antarctic research station Princess Elisabeth. Credit: Harry Zekollari
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