The Halloween fireball and the meteorite

That could just have been another freaky idea to make Halloween even more spectacular: on October 31, 2016, short before 8:00 pm, people leaving near Perth (WA, Australia) could see a bright light literally lit up the sky, shortly followed by a few sonic booms. But it was not. The event was clearly natural: a space rock had just entered the Earth's atmosphere, leading to a huge fireball... and meteorite fall!

When scientists knew that such an event occured, they started calculating the trajectory of the fireball from witness reports and 4 video records.

And after 6 days of search, that was it! Just over a kilogram of fresh chondrite was recovered near the town of Morawa, 300 km North of Perth, remnants of a body which weight should have ranged around 100kg before it entered its final journey in the atmosphere.

With camera monitoring the sky, and new citizen scientist applications to easily and quickly send a fireball report, let's hope this story will be more and more common in the near future!