Thousands of meteorites lying undiscovered in Antarctica offer clues about solar system
dailystar.co.ukartificial intelligence program suggests there may be many more to find, and provides useful clues on where to look for them.The dark-coloured space rocks tend to show up well on the white background of the frozen continent’s ice fields, and a natural phenomenon that pushes snow and ice out to the coast helps concentrate any meteors that have fallen in Antarctica’s interior into places where researchers can find them.Rocks that have fallen from space are more than just interesting curiosities – they provide valuable information about the evolution about the solar system.One object, believed to have been thrown off the surface of Mars millions of years ago, was found to contain "potentially life-giving organic material” which scientists say represents the conditions on the Red Planet’s surface in the distant past.The new AI-led study, entitled A Data-driven Approach in the Search for Antarctic Meteorites, offers a chance to find many more of these fascinating objects.“Meteorites sample planetary bodies that formed and evolved in the Solar System,” the researchers explain, and this material is directly accessible at the Earth’s surface.“This great scientific value is the reason why Antarctic meteorite collection missions have been performed (almost) every year since the concentrating mechanism has been discovered”."We found some unexplored areas with a great potential to find meteorites," study lead author Veronica Tollenaar, a glaciologist at the Free University of Brussels in Belgium, told Space.com."By visiting these locations and using new recovery techniques in the field, such as surveys with drones, we are about to enter a new era of Antarctic meteorite recovery missions," she added.So far, some 45,000 meteorites.
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