Evaluation of a Bespoke Antarctic Meteorite Detection System in Polar Operating Conditions

A bespoke detection system has been constructed for the purpose of identifying iron-rich meteorites which are suspected to exist beneath the ice surface in regions of Antarctica. This system has been specially hardened to the hostile polar environment, and is capable of searching a desired target space of 1 km2 in approximately 11 hours, maintaining a target speed of 15 km/h. The performance of the detector has been validated through structured testing in the High Arctic. A test site was constructed in Ny-Alesund, Svalbard, which contained 13 meteorite surrogates buried at depths between 0 cm (flush with the ground level) and 40 cm. Representative results for detector performance in typical Antarctic operating conditions are reported. The system demonstrates the ability to reliably detect targets as deep as 20 cm using real-time processing, and shows the potential for identifying targets as deep as 30-40 cm with more advanced post-processing, or improvements in the real-time discrimination algorithm.