Can scientists predict where a meteorite will land?
Not usually in advance, but after a fireball is filmed from several places, scientists can calculate its path and predict a search area. In a few rare cases, small asteroids have been spotted in space hours before they hit.
For almost every meteorite fall, nobody knows it is coming. The objects that drop meteorites are typically a metre or less across, far too small and faint to see in space before they arrive. The prediction happens afterwards, and it can be surprisingly precise.
When a fireball is recorded by cameras at two or more sites, scientists can triangulate its path: each camera gives a direction, and where the sight-lines cross reveals the fireball's height and position along its flight. From the changing speed and brightness they can estimate how much mass survived and where the glowing part ended. Then comes the tricky bit: dark flight, the final few minutes when the stone falls without glowing. Its fall is modelled using wind measurements from weather balloons and forecast models, which may push it sideways by kilometres. The result is a predicted fall zone, often a narrow strip a few kilometres long, with lighter stones up-range and heavier ones down-range.
This approach has worked brilliantly. The Winchcombe meteorite in England in 2021 and many falls tracked by camera networks in Australia, Europe and North America were found close to the predicted spots. Weather radar can sometimes even detect the falling stones directly.
True advance prediction is now also possible, though rare. In 2008 a small asteroid named 2008 TC3 was discovered about 19 hours before it exploded over Sudan, and its impact point was forecast accurately; hundreds of fragments, now called Almahata Sitta, were later found. Since then, about a dozen small asteroids have been spotted before impact, and meteorites were recovered from a few of them, including falls in Botswana, France and Germany.