Optimizig the GFO pipeline for more efficient fireball event corroboration

CI: – Dr. M. Cupak

The Science and Technology Centre (SSTC) at Curtin University is the largest planetary science research group in the Southern Hemisphere. The Fireballs team within SSTC operates a continental scale facility called Desert Fireball Network (DFN) in Australia, which continuously records all-sky astronomic imagery from multiple locations. DFN recently expanded into Global Fireball Observatory (GFO) via international collaborations. The motivation of observing fireballs is unveiling of the solar system history from studying the population and properties of space rocks colliding with the Earth. Multiple station observation makes it possible to triangulate and backtrace trajectories, calculate orbits and determine the origin of meteoroids in the solar system and to compute the fall location of possible meteorites, providing both the fresh meteorite and its known origin.
The goal of this project is to leverage the existing research capabilities in planetary science and astronomy to improve the quality and extend the size of the already unprecedented Fireball dataset collected by DFN/GFO. That will enable higher quality research results, where the science component has already secured ARC funding as a part of Discovery Projects scheme for 2020-2023 (“GFO: Illuminating Solar System origins”).
We propose to accomplish this goal with the help of ADACS experts, by 1) improving the existing automated GFO data reduction pipeline, particularly the scheduling and coordination of fireball event corroboration and 2) by adding new functionality – incorporating the fireball event detections by video sensors and collection of video data.
Resource Requirements
SSTC already has HPC time and Nimbus cluster allocation for other projects that can be shared as well as data store allocation of 3PB, all at Pawsey supercomputing centre. On top of that, the Fireballs team has secured a long-term Nectar cluster allocation that will be used for docker repository and as development/test environment.