Global Fireball Observatory – Astrometric calibration container

CI: – Dr. M. Cupak

The Science and Technology Centre (SSTC) at Curtin University is the largest planetary science research group in the Southern Hemisphere. The Fireballs team within SSTC operates a continental scale facility called Desert Fireball Network (DFN) in Australia, which continuously records all-sky astronomic imagery from multiple locations. DFN recently expanded into Global Fireball Observatory (GFO). The motivation of observing fireballs is unveiling of the solar system history from studying the population and properties of space rocks colliding with the Earth. Multiple station observation allows to triangulate and back trace trajectories, calculate orbits and determine the origin of meteoroids in the solar system and to compute the fall location of possible meteorites.
The goal of this project is to leverage the existing research capabilities in the area of planetary science and astronomy by further improving the quality and size the already unprecedented Fireball dataset collected by DFN/GFO. That will enable higher quality research results, where the science component has already secured ARC funding as a part of Discovery Projects scheme for 2020-2023 (GFO: Illuminating Solar System origins).
We propose to accomplish this goal by investing engineering effort into refactoring and improving of the existing automated GFO data reduction pipeline, concentrating on astrometric calibration of fish-eye optical data, both for still images and video records. Important is to achieve high level of automation to allow streamlined astronomical processing and to keep the operations realistic with the existing team of three academic and one technical staff.
On top of the software support, it would be extremely useful to add training support in the field of Docker container technology, including docker-compose.