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First off, you want access to Google Earth and survey the terrain for any vegetation bands that indicate a subsurface anomaly. If the crater is too small for Google Earth's resolution, then use a weather balloon and a camera. If there's no vegetation, or it's too thin to show anomalies up, try a camera that can see into the infrared and take the picture at dusk. The difference in subsurface features will produce a difference in heat output.

That tells you where a crater is and which direction it is facing, therefore it will tell you which direction the ellipse for the strewn field will need to point.

A magnetometer is probably a better bet than GPR (which they've tried in the past without much luck). Combine it with a resistivity meter. Meteorites all contain iron AND nickel (and other trace elements). By knowing the resistivity, you can distinguish a meteorite from any other type of iron. Depending on the age of the impact and climate, you may also be able to detect debris from how it has altered soil chemistry via this method.

For the magnetometer, you want a proton magnetometer/gradiometer, as that's the most sensitive. The link is to a site on how to build one.

They have the world's largest metal detector, but you should be able to make one larger. Furthermore, it's a loop so it is detecting metal above the detector as well as in the ground. What you ACTUALLY want is for the detector to only look at the ground. A suitable reflector should not only achieve this but double the sensitivity at the same time.

That's neat, but I want my glowing motorcycle.

You might want to take a look at LeoCAD. It has some of what you're looking for.

Some exciting, bleeding edge, next generation games already bring this advancement in scratch n sniff technology to you.

http://docwhat.gerf.org/software/per l/barscan/

It includes my and a friend's Perl code, and our C code and a copy of other people's stuff including Pierre's first version of the kernel driver.

Have fun!

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GPL'ed, full version for Windows, beta for Linux. http://leocad.gerf.org. Quite an extensive parts database, really nice output for creating building instructions for use later.

I was thinking the exact same thing when I saw this. 'Microserfs' is great. And yep, the virtual lego program was called Oop. This LegoCAD thing looks neat, but LeoCAD looks a whole lot better, and a lot more like Oop. Must download.

There's a community freeware version of this for Windows AND Linux called LeoCAD. It looks pretty cool (although, I admit I haven't tried it). While the Autodesk/Lego one has 63 available pieces, LeoCAD has over 1000! I didn't see anything on the lego dacta page about purchasing (other than where to find distributors), anyone know how much it costs?

On an offtopic side note, it's funny that they put this story up, but didn't think LeoCAD deserved mention when I submitted it a few months ago. I think there are just too many /. editors with different interests.

leocad

Pretty good too!.

Why does the site seem to make it sound like this can only be used with a couple of Dacta sets (specifically 9630/9645)? No where does it mention using it for other sets, though it seems to imply you could "design" your own parts, hence building a Lego component library...

But why should you? Why not just use LDraw or LeoCAD for modeling your Lego creations?

This might be a good time to mention LeoCAD, a similar program which has a Linux version.