Nullarbor space rock hunt: Crowdfunded scientists return with their best meteorite haul yet

Updated

A group of Melbourne researchers that turned to crowdfunding to pay for their expedition to the Nullarbor in search of meteorites, has returned with its biggest haul yet.

The scientists, led by PhD student Alastair Tait, asked the public to contribute $4,000 towards their project via the crowdfunding site Pozible in February.

If you go to the Nullarbor, you'll know there's no such thing as a pile of iron stone, so he brings back this thing and it's actually a big chunk of meteorite. Alastair Tait, PhD student

After 45 days of fundraising, they raised more than $12,000 which was enough to fund seven people on a 3,400-kilometre round trip from Melbourne, with thousands of dollars left over for future explorations.

"It was really fantastic, in the end we got 305 per cent funding, it was the second highest funded research project on Pozible, in terms of percentage," Mr Tait said.

The funding meant they could take a second car and more students than initially planned, Mr Tait said, which ultimately led to the team coming home with 43 meteorites, the most they had ever found.

"[It was] our biggest haul yet and they are all cold finds. That means they were found in a place where we know there isn't any known meteorites, compared to say going to a known strewn field," he said.

"We actually found a new strewn field this year that hasn't been documented before, so we found 43 meteorites," he said.

Mr Tait said the strewn field would have come from a meteorite that fell to Earth in the last 40,000 years and would have been roughly the same size as the one that exploded over Chelyabinsk in Russia, two years ago.

Mr Tait said a new student joining the group also stumbled across a 1.8 kilogram meteorite which was broken into about 100 pieces.

"We took four people out there this year that had never looked for meteorites, one of them was an honours student and he went out ... and he goes 'oh I found this pile of iron stone in the desert'," he said.

"If you go to the Nullarbor, you'll know there's no such thing as a pile of iron stone, so he brings back this thing and it's actually a big chunk of meteorite.

"So we went over there and the next 45 minutes we were running around with a magnet going, 'got one, got one, got one', like they were spread out over a 13 square metre area."

While the meteorite was not iron, which would have made it an incredibly rare find, it did have flecks of iron in it.

It will now be used by one of the researchers to explore questions about how the solar system was formed.

Answering the solar system's fundamental questions

Five students - two PhD candidates, including Mr Tait, an honours student and two third-year research students - went along for the trip into the desert, accompanied by supervisor Dr Andrew Tomkins and a retired exploration geologist, who supplied the second car.

Dr Tomkins said PhD candidate Andrew Langendam would now study the meteorites to gain a better understanding of how the inner solar system evolved compared to matter in the outer solar system.

"The iron meteorites basically came from the cores of some of the earliest formed asteroids in our solar system, and so we're trying to understand how the cores of those asteroids formed," he said.

"Basically the early asteroids heated up quite quickly within the first 5 million years of the solar system's history and then they melted, and when they melted, the dense iron metal in normal stony meteorites settled towards the core of the asteroids to form an iron-rich core and a silicate rich mantel.

"Some of the meteorites we found were some of the more oxidised meteorites that were heated earlier in the solar system and so they underwent some of this heating process."

Mr Tait's research could provide a guide for researchers for the best places to find life on Mars, Dr Tomkins said.

"Alastair Tait's project is to look at how bacteria might live preferentially inside meteorites," Dr Tomkins said.

"The broader implication of knowing that is if meteorites are good places for bacteria or other life to live, it's potentially somewhere where they might live on the surface of Mars.

"Most of the surface of Mars is covered with basalt, which has minerals in it that aren't particularly favourable for generating energy ... so meteorites should be a better place for bugs to live than the surface of Mars."

'The Nullarbor's a special place'

Dr Tomkins said while the $12,000 raised was only a fraction of what the researchers needed to examine the meteorites and continue their studies, the raw materials and experience it provided was invaluable, and hard to come by under the Australian funding model.

"You absolutely need the materials to be able to do any science," he said.

"The US actually run an Antarctic survey, where they collect meteorites down in Antarctica and a large proportion of the meteorites we have in our global collections come from Antarctica because the US does that.

"In Australia, the Australian Research Council prefers to have a defined science question that can be answered in a single project.

"There are ways of generating research funds for projects that are aimed at data acquisition but it's not as straight forward, it's not as easy to get funding for that sort of thing."

We finally got out and repaired our car, and unfortunately we got a second flat on the trailer and we couldn't change the tyres because the mud and the grit got into the actual nut and you couldn't actually change it. It was quite an adventure getting out. Alastair Tait

He said just being out in the field was inspiring, particularly for the third year students contemplating a research career.

"The Nullarbor's a special place. It's got no trees for the most part, it's flat, it's this big huge open space, it's completely different to be being in Melbourne," Dr Tomkins said.

"You get out there and it's a big open sky, you feel like you've got so much space around you.

"And being out there for a week, camping with a bunch of friends, it's a fun way to do science."

But the money raised by the researchers did not just come in handy for getting them into the desert, $500 set aside for emergencies also helped them repair their car after a hasty desert exit.

"We planned for the trip to go for 10 days, but we had to bug out at eight days because it started to rain out there, and unfortunately when it starts to rain the whole area can get very boggy," Dr Tomkins said.

"The night before it started raining, we took a second car out and the second car broke down, and had a flat so we had to then attach our trailer to the broken car and then with the good car tow all of them out of the Nullarbor.

"It wasn't ideal. It took us about six hours to do 150kms, but we finally got out and repaired our car, and unfortunately we got a second flat on the trailer and we couldn't change the tyres because the mud and the grit got into the actual nut and you couldn't actually change it.

"It was quite an adventure getting out."

University 'cautious' about crowdfunding

The researchers gave their Pozible backers the ultimate say over where they went hunting for meteorites, offering them the chance to vote on three destinations.

They also offered rewards, including meteorite samples, which Mr Tait said would be sent out later this year.

Dr Tomkins said, as an employee of Monash University, he was not involved with the group's Pozible campaign because of the university's official policy on the funding method.

"The university has been quite cautious in approaching the possibility of crowd source funding," he said.

"I was actually, to be honest, a little disappointed about not being allowed to be involved in the campaign because of Monash's policy, but there were benefits to the students that wouldn't have come out otherwise.

"I stood back, let my students run it, and that ended up actually being one of the biggest benefits of the whole program, because that generated so much enthusiasm in the students.

"They genuinely gained a lot out of just running the campaign, let alone the money itself."

But Dr Tomkins said that while there were advantages to the student-led campaign, the university's hands off approach was not necessarily the best way to deal with the emerging avenue of funding.

"I think it's a relatively easy thing to manage personally," he said.

"I think if you had a system where individual departments had an approval process, or an ethics committee approval process, it would be relatively straight forward to do."

Monash University's officially policy on the funding model reads:

"Monash University proactively supports and encourages student innovation through a wide range of initiatives. "While the university does not administer or directly support crowdfunding activities, Monash students are always free to run their own fundraising or other innovation initiatives independently of the university".

A spokesperson for the university said it "recognises crowdfunding as an alternative funding model but the research sector has legitimate reservations regarding issues of quality assurance, ethics and value which crowd funding models regularly create".

Topics: space-exploration, astronomy-space, science-and-technology, university-and-further-education, education, the-universe, information-technology, melbourne-3000, sa

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