Bunburra Rockhole

Collection Highlights | Updated 10 months ago

Of the more than 50,000 meteorites in collections around the world the vast majority are chance finds, only about 1100 were actually observed to fall and quickly recovered. Of these 1100, the phenomena associated with the fall of only a small number have been photographed enabling the orbits of the objects that gave rise to the meteorites landing on Earth to be determined.

In 2006, an Autonomous All-Sky Desert Fireball Camera Network (DFN) was first established in the Nullarbor of Western Australia and now has expanded to cover most of southern Australia. Orbits are calculated from the fireballs, and meteorite fall positions are determined for later recovery.

On 20 July 2007, two cameras of the Desert Fireball Network (DFN) detected the fall of a meteorite in the Nullarbor region. At 19hrs 13mins 53.2 secs (±0.1 sec) Universal Time, a fireball was recorded low on the horizon east of the network area.

The successful recovery of this meteorite now named Bunburra Rockhole (three specimens) represents a number of scientific firsts. While it was the fifth predicted meteorite fall in history, it was the first based solely on data from dedicated instruments. It was the first known meteorite from an Aten-type orbit (near-Earth), the first eucrite basaltic achondrite with a known orbit, and the first instrumentally observed meteorite fall in the southern hemisphere. Moreover, it was the first documented meteorite fall from a relatively small meteoroid, that produced a small fireball with a terminal height of 30 km.

The DFN project continues to make a major contribution to Solar System research.

Meteorite Collection