A group of scientists who travel to the Nullarbor to collect meteorites have received thousands of dollars from the public after they were unable to secure a government grant for their research.

Since 2007, when PhD student Alastair Tait and his team from Melbourne first began their 3,400-kilometre road trips to the desert, they claimed to have found more than 20 per cent of Australia's recorded meteorites.

Their research findings have been published in international journals, including Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta and Meteoritics and Planetary Science.

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But this year, government funding for their expeditions ran out, and they were unable to finance their trip.

"Space science in Australia is poorly funded - the lack of federal space program or private industry radically reduces the number of grants available compared to other countries," Mr Tait said.

"And recently the Government dramatically slashed funding to science and that also means that the number of grants that we can apply for has reduced dramatically."

So, Mr Tait and fellow researchers Andrew Langendam and Sarah Alkemade took their project to the crowd-funding site Pozible to see if the public would support it.

It quickly became obvious that they would.

"Pozible usually say you want to get around 30 per cent funding in a week - we got that in less than 12 hours, so we were really excited by how well this actually went," Mr Tait said.

By 10 days, the group's campaign had reached their $4,000 goal and with two weeks to go, they have now more than doubled that.

"Crowd funding really gets us in contact with the general public who might be interested in space science," he said.

"Communicating science outside of our field is usually something scientists struggle at and crowd funding has really given us a platform to communicate our science not only to Australia, but to right around the world."

Finding meteorites 'is a case of spot the difference'

Meteorites stand out against the colours of the Nullarbor. ( Supplied: Alastair Tait )

Mr Tait said with the extra funds, his team of five would be able to travel for longer and go further afield, to the Nullarbor Plain east of the West Australian border.

The expedition plans to get underway in early to mid April.

Mr Tait said the Australian outback was the ideal place to look for meteorites, making the huge trip from Melbourne worthwhile.

"It's flat, it hasn't changed much in about a million years and it's rather dry so meteorites don't rust away very quickly," he said.

"And the Nullarbor itself is made out of limestone, which is a light sort of creamy coloured rock, and meteorites are usually black or dark maroon.

"So usually it's a case of spot the difference."

He said occasionally the team found "meteor-wrongs" but usually they were able to identify the real things.

"There's a couple of distinctive textures on the outside of meteorites - first of all about 95 per cent of meteorites are magnetic, which is really great because you walk around with a magnetic stick and if a rock sticks, there's a pretty good chance it's a meteorite," he said.

But he said the "really interesting ones" - those from Mars and the Moon - could only be spotted by sight because they were not magnetic.

"If they have a smooth surface with what looks to be thumbprints on the outside, it's got what we call a fusion crust and that's where the meteorite, when coming through the atmosphere, heats up and it melts a part of the rock and it solidifies as glass," he said.

He said about 80 meteorites from Mars had been found around the world, but as yet not one had been found in Australia.

"Every time a new Martian meteorite is found the scientific community hopes it's from a different place in the crust of Mars – so far the meteorites from Mars are thought to have come from six different places – six different impact events that blasted a chunk of Mars off the surface," he said.

"So if we go out say this year and find a Martian meteorite it could be from a part of Mars no-one's ever seen before and that's incredibly important for understanding how Mars formed and evolved over time.

"You just don't get new knowledge by buying meteorites off eBay."

Incidentally, if you went onto Ebay and searched the world for meteorites in the rocks, fossils, minerals section, you would find there more than 13,100 for sale.

"We could go and buy meteorites on Ebay, but we actually have to go to the Nullarbor to have the chance of finding something new," he said.

"If there's no-one out there looking for meteorites, then one of the answers to these questions that we're trying to answer no-one might ever find.

"We'll find something which is relevant, something new, something exciting, something which no-one has ever seen before, and that's what science is for us."

'Not that surprised' by lack of funding

Mr Tait said he and his team has already found several unique meteorites, which have provided valuable knowledge to their field of research.

He described some these meteorites as a "missing link" between meteorites that had been melted and those that had not.

"What this shows is how asteroids in the early solar system were actually heated ... by finding these transitional rocks we can actually understand how many of the asteroids evolved," he said.

"And by understanding this, we can gain insights into how planets like Earth actually formed their metallic cores.

"The Earth's core is very important because it generates the magnetic field that protects us from solar radiation – so core formation dictates if whether a planet is going to be habitable or not."

But he said despite the team's success in their research field he was not surprised that they were unable to win a grant for their latest expedition.

"Space science unlike other sciences in Australia struggles a little bit because our science is very academic and quite esoteric compared to some the other sciences like medicine or geosciences (which are sometimes supported by mining)," he said.

"We like to joke that dinosaurs and space rocks are kind of like the gateway drugs to science, they get the kids interested but no-one really pays you to know these things later on.

"But they're very important because they are what drives understanding of the bigger questions like where do we come from, what's our history, where are we going and is there life elsewhere in the solar system."

Mr Tait said most of the research on this trip would be centred around early planetary formation and whether meteorites that have fallen onto the surface of Mars could potentially host microbial life.

Another researcher was extracting micro-meteorites from 2.7-billion-year-old rocks from the Kimberley to work out how much extraterrestrial material was falling to Earth back then.

While another was looking into core formation in the dwarf planet Ceres – soon to be visited by the Dawn spacecraft – and in the moons around Jupiter and exo-planets, he said.