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Meteorites are among the most important objects scientists can study to understand the solar system, but finding them is tricky and time-consuming. Now, one team of researchers is trying to speed up the process with drones.

at the University of California, Davis, and his colleagues have been trialling using drones and machine learning to find these rocks shortly after their blazing journey through the atmosphere.

The NASA-funded study flew a camera-equipped consumer drone over a dry lake bed in Nevada, where meteorites may have fallen following a meteor fireball in 2019.

Aerial images were scrutinised by machine-learning software that had been taught to flag objects that looked like dark space rocks. The researchers also placed their own meteorite specimens, which the software had been trained on, under the drone鈥檚 flight path to see if the system could recognise those too.

There were a number of false positives, but the software managed to identify the meteorite specimens the researchers left on the lake bed. It also helped highlight several meteorite candidates that might have landed in the area after the 2019 fireball. The researchers then travelled to and inspected these rocks, aided by the drone鈥檚 GPS data. All, however, proved to be terrestrial in nature.

Drone searches could be especially useful for meteorite falls that involve a small number of hard-to-find rocks. Such events are more common than those in which a large amount of material drops to Earth, says Citron.

鈥淚f we can improve our ability to search more of these small falls then we can gain a lot more data connecting meteorite samples to their tracked incoming trajectories,鈥� he says.

If the systems can be made to work on terrain like the UK countryside 鈥� where dark-coloured sheep droppings recently confounded even expert researchers looking for meteorites 鈥� that would be a 鈥済ame changer鈥�, says at the University of Glasgow, UK. She was on the team that, despite the livestock faeces, eventually found fragments of meteorite in a grassy field聽in Gloucestershire this year.

鈥淚 can see how the drone tech would certainly be very useful, however, for a geological environment of high contrast and few other objects that would be similar [to meteorites],鈥� she adds.