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Ask Slashdot: What Gadgets Would You Use For Hunting Meteorites?
DrPeper writes "I may have an opportunity to assist a pair of renowned meteorite hunters (yes, the ones on the Science Channel). Being the MacGyver-type everywhere I've worked and a consummate geek, I thought I would pose a question to the Slashdot community. If you were to go meteorite hunting, what gadgets would you use? I've already thought of using a UAV with a radio gradiometer, or attaching a coil to a quadrocopter, blimp, or terrestrial robot. (The point of which would be to have it automatically produce a gradient map of the density of ferrous metals in a given area.) Any other crazy ideas out there?"
A gun.
Enough said
Access http://www.meteoritefinder.com/ through my phone.
Am I eval()? - http://www.monst3r.com.br
You know the one that was on /. the other day that NASA has setup cameras around the country that capture pictures of metorites and which calculates trajectory, distance, and potential landing sites....
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
Meteorites tend to be made of metal and thick enough to shrug off most hunting rounds with ease.
Barret 50 is the hunting weapon you need. Now who said it didn't have a sporting purpose?!
Let's see... Falcon 9, Bigelow Spacehab, Dragon Capsule, Canadarm/Dextre, Spacesuit...
Oh! Meteor-ITE. Right. Nevermind then.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Head over to Tower Hobbies and find yourself a cheap, decently built RTF trainer. Add a boostercam (http://www.boostervision.com/boostervision/default.asp) and with some minor modifications you should be good to go. Plus, RC is a great hobby to get into if you aren't already.
Slap a Kinect on it, and you can get 3D terrain maps from above to look for smaller impact craters. See: http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/01/24/1710210/Kinect-Hack-Builds-3D-Maps-of-the-Real-World Also, recommend a few Hellfire missiles. Just in case.
A plasma ray gun with a 50 watt range of course!
A Roomba installed into an oversize frame with extra batteries, and these magnets on the bottom:
;-)
United Nuclear
For extra points install a solar charging system.
"Bah!" - Dogbert
I would use whatever the renowned meteorite hunters are using. They must be renowned meteorite hunters for a reason, and probably know what gear to use.
Tired of being "punished" by the Slashdot $rtbl since 2002. I'm now over at http://soylentnews.org/ .
Two pounds of semtex, an egg timer, radiation suit, 3 rolls of duct tape, and NO QUESTIONS ASKED. I'm sorry, what were we looking for again?
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
WARNING: Parent is Goatse
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
If you're on a budget then the only really viable option is a tractor beam, bring them down to the ground. Entering the atmosphere and a hard landing means that you get ready killed part cooked meteorite to take home.
"Welcome to our world. We are the wasted youth. And we are the future too." Yes, I know these are stupid lyrics.
I've already thought of using a UAV with a radio gradiometer, or attaching a coil to a quadrocopter, blimp, or terrestrial robot. (The point of which would be to have it automatically produce a gradient map of the density of ferrous metals in a given area.) Any other crazy ideas out there?"
Yeah, OK.
dressing up as a dinosaur should do the trick
we were expecting a vote, text message, something? no, we have to read/watch about it in spanish, swahili, youtubeian.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=bX7hMj2NKTc#at=120
anything to stop ourselves from thinking about our questionable religious training, bogus math, science, weather & history history.
get three things:
1) Garden Hose
2) Your House
3) Big magnet
Put the big magnet in a (ice cream or oil pan) bucket under the downspout of your gutters.
Spray the top of your house with the garden hose completely, making sure to cover every inch, adjust the magnet to be in the water stream as is enters the bucket.
Pick off the little bits that stick to your magnet.
Each sticky bit on the magnet is a meteorite that entered the atmosphere to burn up and shrink in size small enough to land softly on your roof.
Don't click on the blog link above unless you've got eye bleach...
I'd use a time machine.
What? You want an explanation?
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
The primary concern should be to make the search better or faster than what can be done by humans without the gadgets.
What can machines do better than humans? Sense magnetic fields. Process signals faster. Move faster. Perform repetitive tasks in an automated fashion.
Whatever you do, be sure to test before you do any serious field work and take plenty of spare parts.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
I'm not exactly familiar with the sensitivity of a typical magnetometer in an Android phone, but you could theoretically use them to find magnetic anomalies caused by the metal. Download one of the free metal detector apps, or just the one called Tricorder, which is also free, and lets you access many of the sensors, after which you can use the magnetometer to pick up anomalous flux densities indicative of a piece of metal underground.
Good luck, and good hunting!
Hyperbole: I use it liberally!
If those meteorites were trying to hide she'd find them in less than a heartbeat.
Or if you're talking about boring terrestrial meteor hunting, you just need a good magnet, gps and metal detector.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
I watched one episode where the meteorite hunter guys were using a home-made metal-detector that was made from PVC pipe and hitched onto a vehicle. They were having problems because the thing kept breaking. Using PVC pipe is a fine way to fabricate stuff quick and dirty, but there was just so much room for improvement in their design. Even just wrapping a couple of the heavier load bearing pipes with a bit of fiberglass+resin would've gone a long way to save them headaches in the field. I don't know if they've already improved it by now. I watched the preview episodes and it rather bored me, so I haven't seen it since.
Cheap, effective for finding ferrous meteorites. We use magnets from old hard drives. Good place to look is the average winter windward shore of a large dry lake bed, where small meteorites tend to get concentrated. Look for signs of eolian erosion. Poke around until something sticks. Kinda time-consuming, but we've found a couple chondrites that way. Probably doesn't make good TV, though.
Having followed closely academically organized meteorite finds, it turns out that what you need most of all is human eyes and lots of them. Assuming you have figured out where to look already, walking a grid pattern is one of the most effective ways. I suppose a metal detector will help with some kinds of meteorites, but really, the human eye is one of the best tools for the job.
More Caffeine. NOW
or a European Swallow, I forget which.
Take a shotgun...
You don't have to point exactly at it to hit it.... (Think Eastwood in Unforgiven)
to pore over high res photographs of the desert.
anyone who finds a meterotie gets a $500 bonus.
what else?
Hit 'em hard, hit 'em fast.
Damn meteorites. Oh, and it helps to go out in your backyard and scream, "You think, you bad mutha fucka! You think you bad?"
It will definitely impress the neighbors.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
All the meteor hunters I've seen used an off-the-shelf metal detector. Of course, that only works for the vast majority of meteorites which are iron/nickel.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
-cheap metal detector
-long stick with rare earth magnets taped to the end
-enough water for the day
-optional-
revolver with snakeshot
Consider plotting an "isobar" map (contour map) of something in the area, such as magnetic field variations or ground conductivity.
The resulting contours will often indicate the presence and location of anomalies. This method (plotting ground conductivity and connecting the measurements to make a contour map) was used to find lost oil well holes which were seeping oil into the groundwater.
That thing they use in Jurassic park...
like Alaska or Siberia, and just look for black objects..?
You check out the H3 Device at h3tec.com; this is the real deal.
http://h3tec.com/
You would get much better answers by joining the meteorite mailing list, which is read by plenty of experienced meteorites, including Steve Arnold and Geoff Notkin. Go to: http://www.meteoritecentral.com/
An image processing computer farm and Google Earth.
Several large impact craters have been identified nearly by accident just by people looking at satellite data. With some work on image processing algorithms, there are likely oodles of ~10 meter sized crater remnants to be found scattered around the middles of nowhere, which nobody has noticed over the past few centuries since formation.
I stubbed my toe on a pretty good sized (± 10 lb) meteorite hiking around in the desert in the early '60's. It ended up in the University of Arizona collections.
A shotgun.
Be vewy vewy quiet, I'm hunting meteowites.
Head to the Arthur Ross Hall of Meteorites, and I guarantee you'll find some.
If it just fell from the sky, get some kind of infrared detector. It'll be hotter than ambient for a while.
Two Words: Nuclear Fucking Weapons, OK?
Drive around a field with a honda generator, some big capacitors, and an elongated superconductive magnet on the bottom of your vehicle in front of your tires. Place a strong nonconductive board or something behind the magnet as it appears on the vehicle, and wait for the meteorite to be pulled out of the ground by your magnet. When your vehicle slows down, perhaps the magnet has pulled something out of the ground and it's now scraping against your nonconductive board?
Just an idea
PS: Use a ford
Back in junior high and high school, I put several powerful magnets on the undercarriage of a simple, simple cart I designed, which could be pulled by string. I put a flexible piece of plastic across them, and set the wheels to hold the magnets about two centimeters above the ground. I towed this contraption across the bottom of several local swimming pools in the off-season, prior to, immediately after, and two weeks after the Leonid meteor shower. The microanalysis lab at a nearby university yielded promising results...
That said, micrometeorites are hardly TV material.
The easiest possible way to collect meteorites is to place a large, flat pan out on your back deck (or a large funnel with a fine screen like those they sell at breweries). Leave it out to collect rainwater. After a few heavy rains, you will notice that there is a small amount of fine grit in the filter or in the bottom of the pan. Carefully drain the water out of it and let it dry the rest of the way. Dump it out on a sheet of white paper, and go over the grit with a powerful magnet (like the ones that come inside old hard disk drives) wrapped in a plastic bag.
Usually about 1/3 to 1/2 of the grit will be attracted to the magnet. It is made up of fragments of small nickel-iron meteorites of the sort that constantly rain in upon the Earth every day and that are one of many things that nucleate rainwater drops. A lot of the remaining grit is probably meteor dust as well, but stony meteor dust, and since some fraction of it is just plain old dust blown up from the ground, it is difficult to differentiate. But chunks of iron falling from the sky are probably meteor material.
This is actually a fairly entertaining thing to do. You can look at the chunks you collect at maybe 10-30 power under a microscope, and see that they often do look melted and fused like their larger cousins. If you run a trap for a while and pull out the ferrous micrometeorites regularly, you can actually build up a small vial full of the stuff. My kids each did this as elementary science fair projects when they reached the right age, and it was always one of the most popular of displays.
Finding larger meteorites isn't terribly difficult either as they constantly fall as well, but identifying them is more difficult. A rock, after all, looks a lot like a rock. Stony meteorites may not look like the right kind of rock for some location, but a non-expert isn't going to see the difference easily. Iron meteorites again are the easiest ones to identify if not find -- unless you live near an iron mine, an isolated chunk of iron-rich rock has a decent chance of being a meteorite. For these, good metal detectors can help.
Some places make it easier to find meteorites than others. If you wander around in the middle of a big, arid, flat, desert, meteor craters sometimes stand out, unweathered, or stray rocks out on the surface turn out to be meteorites. Plowed fields and so on again let you look over a large surface area in a relatively short time, but even so it is a crap shoot. The only decent sized meteorite I've found I found without a metal detector -- it was a heavy, iron-rich rock out of place in the middle of a field. But anybody can find the micro-kind, right in their own back yard!
As for equipment -- the same hard-disk drive magnet that you use to pull out the micrometeorites, securely attached to the end of your walking stick, is a great way to find them. If you're walking through a field (again in some part of the country not known for having native iron deposits) and your walking stick happens to pick up a chunk of possibly fused-looking rock, well, there you are!
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
"I've already thought of using a UAV with a radio gradiometer, or attaching a coil to a quadrocopter, blimp, or terrestrial robot."
Nope. *Maybe* a metal detector might be useful, but that will only find the iron-nickel meteorites. For the stony ones it would be useless.
By far the best way to hunt for meteorites is: A) go to the right location, B) know what to look for, and C) use your eyes.
The best places to prospect (i.e. step A) are desert areas with little vegetation and with little or no active sediment deposition on the surface to cover up any meteorites that fall. Essentially you're looking for a surface where not much sediment accumulation has happened for a long time. Desert pavement areas that are experience deflation (wind-caused net erosion) are particularly good places to hunt, because they will tend to concentrate pebbles and boulders and are experiencing erosion. Another good place to hunt is dry lake beds, which are far from source areas of rocks and generally consist of fine-grained sediment. It helps to pick locations that have distinctive indigenous rock types that will make the meteorites stand out (e.g., say, light-colored granites or other light-colored rocks or sediment). For what to look for (B), most meteorites when fresh have a black fusion crust. This is another reason to pick desert areas, because the meteorites will weather more slowly and be more likely to maintain their distinctive features. For stony meteorites the fusion crust will often break off revealing the crystalline rock inside. For iron nickel, well, the density is a big giveaway, or if they've been weathered you'll see the rust. They often have a scalloped appearance on the surface due to melting. this picture shows how obvious meteorites can be in the right conditions. And that's the real trick to finding them: finding a location where they will stand out from the far more numerous terrestrial rocks. After that, you just need to be observant (C), and systematically scan the area. Ideally, of course, you go to an area with an observed fall.
The only "gadget" I'd take with me (other than normal back-packing gear) is a GPS to mark the locations where you find specimens, or maybe binoculars. While instrumentation seems like an obvious application to the problem, it would probably pick up far too many false positives to be useful, and miss too many good candidates.
I would hack the mass media and put word out that saddam hussein managed to stash some 'weapons of mass destruction' deep within the meteor. Let Obama and NASA do the rest...
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.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Without an accurate method of determining the position of your UAV/blimp/whatever you're not going to be producing maps of any accuracy. (And consumer grade GPS isn't going to cut it.) Not to mention, you don't mention the sensitivity of your mapping instrument, etc... etc...
Obama commands the French military.
Other than that; not my cup of tea. =)
Get a truffle hunting pig and beam it with vast amounts of gamma radiation.
That should transform it into a meteorite hunting pig.
Um, or Hulk Pig.
Wait. I better go check my notes.
DON'T DO ANYTHING UNTIL I GET BACK!
Hooking Clark Kent up to an EKG would be effective for *some* meteorites.
Among those of us who have seriously used metal detectors to make money it is known that there is no one best detector for every environment. Simply having several different high end detectors at hand from various builders can enable much more successful searches. It is shocking how much that can be found by an experienced metal detector user. By experienced I mean experienced in a specific terrain as a full time hunter for at least five years and in snow states even five years is not sufficient to gain experience as winter shuts down hunting quite a bit. It makes little difference in what type of find that you seek. The right person, invested in the correct gear, with experience and a great deal of persistence can come up with astounding results.
Train one to sniff out meteorites. Don't forget the bag of doggie treats for rewards.
Have gnu, will travel.
A huge sheet of paper and about a ton of iron filings.
If you attempt to do meaningful surveys with electronic instruments from the air, you need to keep your altitude very steady, or your results will be meaningless.
An absolute minimum alternative would be real-time altitude data alongside any other data you gather, so you can compute altitude corrections to your data afterward.
Either approach comes with some difficulty.
I'd go get some Pentax film cameras, wide angle lenses, and some super slow film that you can set to capture some and all of the night.
One camera might take a single exposure showing the whole night.
Another camera might take one exposure for 2 hours, every 2 hours.
Another camera might split the night into 4 hour segments.
And capture for days. weeks. months...
Study and report.
Tell those guys they should try a hound. Seriously. Just train it using known recent fallen rocks. It will figure out a common smell and learn from that. Make sure you honor private property signs in Texas. That's my only other tip.
Just like they use to find truffles. I mean, hounds are good, but hogs are better. And smarter. Just take more time and attention to train. For run-of-the-mill cancers, though, I'd say hounds. Unless you're looking for bioactive meteorites, in which case it'd be better to have at least one of each.
The hogs, or dogs, can be trained.in the usual manner - by playing hide-and-seek with meteorite samples and rewarding the right behavior. Be patient. Be kind. Be supportive. For recently-fallen meteorites, you might want to pre-heat the toys, or wrap them in electric blankets before hiding them.
Warthogs could also be trained to dig it up for you. Saving you even more effort. Finicky beasts, though.
Birds-of-prey with exceptional eyesigfht would be good, but are better in the ultraviolet than in the infrared. Reptiles are better for that. And some have really keen senses of smell-taste. Training them is iffy, though (except for "iguas"). If iridium fluoresces in the ultraviolet, then birds might have a handle on it. Even if its buried, might show up in the vegetation above, after a while. Ditto for downstream and downwind, perhaps.
Analysing the vegetation and wildlife - and mapping the results - might give you some clues. Preferr deep-rooted species, burrowers, and their predators. Maybe you won't have to kill them, just analyse their droppings.
Sounds like a fun life's project.
not to far from the truth actually. However, it works better if you don't have shingles (terrestrial ferrous materials in the sand on the shingles can lead to false positives.) So, metal roof, which you hose once to clean, then ignore for a year, and hose again for meteor droppings.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
The second truck is to replace your other pickup that got hit by a meteorite.
Bring a polar bear. They are always on the lookout for sky iron.
look at the end of a moving ice glacier in the rock dropped out of the ice. Every thing that falls on the ice sheet over a long time will be dumped there.
However, it works better if you don't have shingles
Well, I've got a rash, but I don't thinkit's shingles. Does that count?
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Wait for it to snow then just look for dark stuff
In Antarctica. The distribution of asteroids there must be the same as the distribution anywhere else. It's just that they're easier to find.
How many more years will slashdot have an off-by-one error on your Score in your profile?
Seeing that it is easiest to find meteorites in areas devoid of vegetation, the required tools are rather obvious, but you may want to throw in some water, bully beef, a stove, a tent and a Swiss Army Knife...
Back when I was a student intern at USGS, I digitized a bunch of paleomag data for their now defunct (thanks science hating legislators) branch of CIMRI. A plane had flown over taking wave measures of Guyana, and it was my job to 'click' where every magnetic point intersected a topo map line. Rudimentary version of this: gps with fancy metal detector.
What gadgets would I use??? Well an iPhone, of course!
There's an app for that!
Just tell them that they're truffles.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
and go to Greenland or Antarctica where the rapid melting exposes them.
Global Climate Change has many benefits, more noticeable storms and meteorites.
At first I thought the headline read "Hunting Minorities"
Landsat (http://landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/), I think is maintained by EROS (http://eros.usgs.gov/) in South Dakota, is used for mapping minerals deposits. Meteorites may be too diluted to show much of a signature.