The meteor that captivated Queensland earlier this month was the largest space rock recorded over Australia in at least 30 years, NASA data has confirmed.
The fireball lit up the sky between Mackay and the Gulf of Carpentaria on May 20.
The event was picked up by US government Sensors with data published to the NASA website on Monday.
When it exploded, the meteor had an altitude of 29 kilometres over Blackbull, a small rural locality between the Gulf communities of Normanton and Croydon, in north-west Queensland.
The data revealed the meteor was travelling at a velocity of almost 28 kilometres per second.
The force of the blast was equivalent to exploding 7.2 kilotons of TNT.
From this, scientists have calculated the incoming space rock would have had a diameter of 3.5 metres — roughly the size of a caravan — and weighed about 80,000 kilograms.
Curtin University's planetary scientist Ellie Sansom said it was the largest fireball reported by US Government Sensors over Australia since record-keeping began in 1988.
"I was checking every day and then the data finally came through – it's the biggest event that it has ever recorded over Australia," Dr Sansom said.
The observations have filled gaps in the Desert Fireball Network of cameras, a project led by Curtin University, which observes meteor activity in Australia.
Dr Sansom said the new data confirmed meteor fragments "definitely" would have landed in the wider Croydon area.
"Anything that's below 35 kilometres we're usually confident there's stuff on the ground, and for it to get as low as 29 kilometres, there's probably going to be quite a lot of that leftover in little pieces," she said.
Experts are now planning a search expedition to recover meteorites within weeks.
"We are going to get scientists together from here at Curtin University, probably Monash and from University of Southern Queensland, along with some keen amateurs as well," Dr Sansom said.
The search team would liaise with local authorities, property owners and traditional landowners.
"We'll try and organise a time where we can get as many people on the ground as possible," she said.
Dr Sansom said the opportunity to study meteorites was fantastic for science and future planetary defence.
"These big ones that come in are actually quite rare, something that size probably hits the [entire] Earth once a year," she said.
