Meteorite that lit up WA's skies found by police officer, Desert Fireball Network

Australia Broadcast Center

18-05-2025

A country police officer has won the race to recover a meteorite that lit up the skies over southern Western Australia.
It's believed the astronomical anomaly dubbed the Mother's Day Meteorite entered the atmosphere over the Central Wheatbelt about 6am on May 11, travelling south.
A team of scientists from Curtin University's Desert Fireball Network (DFN), who track meteors across Australia, mapped its trajectory, estimating the impact point just south of the Breakaways, 460 kilometres east of Perth in the state's Goldfields.
DFN director Eleanor Sansom and her team was in the sky over the crash site when the discovery was made.
"I wasn't quite sure we would see anything, but we pretty quickly came across a few exciting suspects," she said.
"We circled around, and there were two or three spots on the lake that we were pretty sure were meteorites in the lake.
"Then we saw someone out on one of the lakes, scouting around, and we thought, 'Oh, wow, someone has actually gone out to search.'
"That's the person who found one yesterday."
The man on the ground was Ravensthorpe police officer and amateur meteorite hunter Marcus Scott.
Mr Scott, who has found dozens of meteorites on the Nullarbor, was thrilled when he learnt the meteorite may have fallen in his backyard.
After a two-hour drive and scramble through dense bush, Mr Scott reached the salt lake and quickly found what he was looking for.
"It's a very easy place to find a meteorite, especially if it's recent, like this one, only being seven days since it fell," he said.
"The weather has been pretty good out there, so you're going to see the impact on the salt lake and it will stand out.
"This was in an open area and quite easy to spot, but the kangaroo prints and the emu prints from a distance also look like a meteorite impact.
"So you can find yourself wasting a lot of time chasing after them."
Mr Scott estimated the space rock to be about the size of a tennis ball, weighing about 450 grams.
And while not a thing of beauty, he said the Mother's Day Meteorite was one of his most special finds.
"There are some very nice meteorites that land on Earth, but I wouldn't rank this as a thing of beauty.
"It's more of a thing of interest.
"It's only been there for seven days compared to thousands of years, and that makes it a bit more special.
While other meteorites he has found have "terrestrial weathering", this one looks "a lot more like what a meteorite should look like".
"So I would say it's definitely something worth finding," Mr Scott said.
The discovery of the first sample has not stopped Dr Sansom and her team, whose aerial reconnaissance had indicated other samples still to be recovered.
"We spotted three potential sites and [Mr Scott's rock] was one of them, then there are probably two more," she said.
"When it came through [the atmosphere] there were lots of bright flashes, and every time there's a bright flash, that means the rocks fragmented.
"This is going to have quite a lot of little pieces of material … what we call a strewn field.
"I think this one's going to be quite a special rock, and if it is, it will be incredible to get as much of it as we can."