Planetary scientist · NASA Postdoctoral Fellow, Johnson Space Center
Meteorites are most of what we know about how the solar system formed — and a biased sample of it. I work out what that bias is, using fireball cameras, weather radar and telescopic surveys.
Across the Earth, every night, thousands of automated stargazers are waiting to take pictures of shooting stars. I am one of the scientists who study these meteors.
Meteorite collections aren't a fair sample of what hits Earth. What survives to the ground is decided by an object's history close to the Sun, not only where it came from.
I’m a planetary scientist at NASA Johnson Space Center, in the Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science (ARES) division. I study small bodies — asteroids and comets — to understand how the solar system formed and how it has changed since.
Most of what we know about that history comes from meteorites, and meteorites are a badly biased sample. We have the samples, but we don’t know how they were sampled. Before a rock reaches a collection it has to survive repeated close passes to the Sun, then atmospheric entry, then a search that has to find it, and each of those steps preferentially destroys a particular kind of material. Working out what that selection removes is what makes the samples interpretable.
Most of my work combines all-sky fireball camera networks with Doppler weather radar, and compares both against asteroids and comets observed telescopically. At NASA I’m using Bayesian methods to combine optical fireball observations with radar, which gives better dark-flight trajectories, better predictions of where meteorites land, and a clearer view of the fragmentation and ablation a rock goes through on the way down — all of which can be tied back to what telescopes saw before it arrived.
The goal is to make the whole sequence routine: observe an object in space, record its entry with cameras, radar, infrasound, seismometers and spectra, then recover pieces of it on the ground. That matters most for objects 10–100 m across, small enough for surveys to miss and large enough to do damage, so the same measurements that tell us how the solar system is put together also feed planetary defense.
I earned my PhD at Curtin University in 2022 with the Desert Fireball Network, spent two years at Paris Observatory, and asteroid (33964) Patrickshober is named after me.
The fireballs, instruments and figures behind the results — each one credited to whoever made it
Interactive: see a fall in weather radar
My asteroid