Geologists have discovered a meteorite fragment, estimated to be 4.5 billion years old, in Australia. After a greenish fireball streaked above the Australian Outback in November, meteorite researchers went hunting for the space rock that had caused the cosmic display. They have just announced success after pulling the old rock out of the salty mud near a remote lake bed in the desert… and just moments before heavy rains would have washed it away Science Alert reports: The recovery operation involved a network of 32 remote camera observatories, a mass of complicated geographical calculations, an aerial spotter, a remotely operated drone, two human searchers, and a whole lot of luck. It all began on 27 November 2015, when the fragment was hurtled down to Earth’s surface from space. Locals in the William Creek and Marree areas of South Australia witnessed its descent, and it was also spotted by the Desert Fireball Network (DFN) – a series of linked digital cameras that monitor the skies above the outback and look for traces of incoming meteorites. Once the rock had been spotted, the race was on to find it. After some image analysis, triangulation, and other calculations, the search began in [...]