Lightning Spotting Sats Used to Study Fireballs

Scientists have repurposed data from a lightning spotting instrument aboard the GOES 16 and 17 weather satellites to find bolides using machine learning.

IMAGE: Each year, spotting scopes and ground telescopes witness only about a dozen or so bolides with enough detail to extract data from them. In a new study, researchers used machine learning to increase the detection rate of bolides with data from lightning-spotting satellites. CREDIT: Jijian Fan, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Whether looking for stars around the black hole at the center of our galaxy or looking for fireballs in the night sky…