Hey SPace Placers!
Have you ever seen a bright fireball streak across the sky? If you have , you know how awe inspiring and a bit disconcerting it can be at the same time! Wonder where they come from?
It has been estimated that over 100 tons, that is over 200,000 POUNDS of space debris - cometary and asteroid material - hits the Earth every single day! That is a lot of cosmic debris over the course of a year, decades, centuries and eons!
NASA has started a network of all sky camera monitoring stations that are designed to record bight fireballs and thereby gain enough data to allow the computing of the orbit for the incoming body.
Over time we should collect enough data to know where these objects are coming from and perhaps their origin - comet or asteroid or space junk.
As an added bonus, if the incoming object is bight enough - translation = bigger - analyzing the data and images might lead to the recovery of any material that ay have hit the ground - meteorites!
Read More About It: http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2011/01mar_meteornetwork/
Sky Guy in VA