What falls versus what we recover: Quantifying search and recovery bias for orbital meteorites
Patrick M. Shober, Jeremie Vaubaillon, Hadrien A. R. Devillepoix, Eleanor K. Sansom, Sophie E. Deam, Simon Anghel, Francois Colas, Pierre Vernazza, Brigitte Zanda
MAPS, Version of Record online: 22 September 2025
“Instrumentally determined pre-atmospheric orbits of meteorites offer crucial constraints on the provenance of extraterrestrial material and the dynamical pathways that deliver it to Earth. However, recovery efforts are focused on larger and slower impacts due to their higher survival probabilities and ease of detection. In this study, we investigate the prevalence of these biases in the population of recovered meteorites with known orbits. We compiled a data set of 75 meteorites with triangulated trajectories and compared their orbits to 538 potential > 1 g meteorite-dropping fireballs detected by the Global Fireball Observatory, the European Fireball Network, and the Fireball Recovery and InterPlanetary Observation Network. Our results reveal that objects with small semi-major axis values (a<1.8 au) appear 2–3 x more often than expected. The current sample of meteorites with known orbits does not reflect the sources of meteorites in our collections, and it is essential to account for search and recovery biases to obtain a more representative understanding of meteorite source contributions.”
