Are Earth-observing satellites a good way to find meteorites ?
Fiction: In Brown’s story, the seminal meteorite is found from orbit. Introducing this find, the fictional NASA Administrator [p. 80] says: “The President asked me to brief you fully…[Earth-Observing Satellites, or] EOS is a constellation of five NASA satellites which scrutinize the earth in different ways–ocean mapping, geological fault analyses, polar ice-melt observations, location of fossil fuel reserves…Two weeks ago, the Polar Orbiting Density Scanner [PODS] passed over the ice shelf and spotted a density anomaly that looked nothing like anything we’d expected to see. Two hundred feet beneath the surface, perfectly embedded in a matrix of solid ice, PODS saw what looked like an amorphous globule about ten feet in diameter. …As it turns out, the rock in the ice beneath us is significantly more dense than any type of rock found …within a four-hundred-mile radius.” Fact: Here, one discovers an instance of Brown’s attention to detail. The Earth Observing System (EOS) indeed
