A Cosmic Shooting Gallery
A public lecture by 2017 ATSE Eminent Speaker Professor Phil Bland, Department of Applied Geology, Curtin University.
The Earth sits in a cosmic shooting gallery. In this lecture Dr Phil Bland spoke about the window that the Desert Fireball Network gives us on asteroid impacts, and how the project might change our understanding of how planetary systems form. His talk looked at the journey that these rocks have taken, from their origins far beyond the orbit of Mars, to their landing sites in the Australian desert, and the excitement of searching for them in the Australian bush.
This public lecture was sponsored by the UWA Institute of Advanced Studies and the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering (ATSE) - https://www.atse.org.auProfessor Phil Bland came to Australia in 2012 on a ARC Australian Laureate Fellowship. He is on science teams for several space missions, including the NASA OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample-return mission which launched last year. His research focusses on the origins and early evolution of the solar system. In 2006 Asteroid ‘1981 EW21’ was renamed ‘(6580) Philbland’ for contributions to planetary science. Most recently his work has included construction of the Desert Fireball Network – the worlds largest planetary observational facility, built to track meteorites to the ground, and recover them from desert areas of Australia. The system allows us to track meteorites back to their source regions in the solar system.