‘We found it!’
At 9.04 pm on the evening of March 13th 2024, a fireball shot across the South Island of New Zealand. The combined fireball path was calculated from 96 to 23 km elevation by four camera stations, which showed that it decelerated from 18 km/s to 5 km/s. The dark flight model for the main mass resulted in a strewn field in the Tekapo/Takapō region of the central South Island, and an 810 gram fusion-encrusted stony meteorite was recovered within 30 minutes of beginning the public search (see the MeteorNews article for the full story).
Fireballs Aotearoa’s network comprises meteor-tracking camera mounted in schools, institutions, observatories and with the public. The goals of our non-commercial camera network are to aid the discovery and characterisation of New Zealand’s next meteorite, feed into global meteor shower observations, and engage the public in night-sky observations. We are a Section of the Royal Astronomical Society of New Zealand. We welcome anyone who’s interested.
Out There Learning have a great 15 minute YouTube video about Takapō here.
The meteorite is now officially recognised by The Meteoritical Society as the “Takapō” meteorite. Click here for the official Bulletin.
The Karmaka Meteorites web page has a comprehensive description of Takapō with lots of pictures and links to other resources.
A 3D scan of is available as a .STL file. At 119MB it is rather large, but provides exquisite detail. Thank you to Janina Nakajima (Castro) who did the scanning and processing via photogrammetry and to Prof. Steven Mills who is the head of the Computer Science Program at Otago Uni and who secured the funding to purchase the photogrammetry instrument used for the scan.