Philip Bland
The planetary scientist who built the Desert Fireball Network across the Australian outback and recovered the Murrili meteorite from a salt lake in 2016.
Key facts
- Nationality
- British
- Field
- Planetary scientist
Philip A. Bland is a British planetary scientist who worked at the Natural History Museum and Imperial College London before moving to Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia. His research covers how chondrites formed and how they were changed by water and impacts on their parent asteroids.
Bland led the building of the Desert Fireball Network, a set of automated cameras spread across the deserts of Australia. Clear skies and open ground make the outback an ideal place to watch for fireballs and find meteorites, which stand out on the bare land. The network grew to cover millions of square kilometres.
On 27 November 2015 the cameras captured a fireball over Kati Thanda–Lake Eyre in South Australia, a vast salt lake. The team worked out where the meteorite should have landed, and on 31 December 2015, racing against coming rain that could have washed the area clean, they found a stone of about 1.7 kilograms buried in the mud. It was named Murrili, after the local Aboriginal name for the area.
The network has since helped set up similar cameras in other countries, forming a global fireball observatory to recover more meteorites with known orbits.
On the timeline
- 31 December 2015Murrili is pulled from a salt lake