The FRIPON Project or Pride and Prejudice in Citizen Science
Résumé
FRIPON (Fireball Recovery and InterPlanetary Observation Network www.fripon.org) is a French project aiming to monitor the French skies 24 hours a day. FRIPON will detect meteors in order to estimate their orbit outside the atmosphere and to statistically determine possible parent bodies, as well as their trajectory inside the atmosphere to discover possible meteorites after the impact. A network of one hundred low-cost all-sky cameras is being installed all over France, coupled with radio receivers and spectroscopes. FRIPON will exploit data from other networks (seismographs, infrasound microbarometers) to increase chances of meteorite recovery and to improve the understanding of its properties. Data retrieving and analysis are automatized in order to minimize the time elapsed between meteor detection and field prospection. The project federates four research institutions although it is founded on the participation of a number of research laboratories, and cultural associations. Astronomers, geologists and engineers work together with a rich and already independently structured community of amateurs. FRIPON is a project where openness and transparency must cooperate with centralization and control, an example of the delicate balance between outreach, unavoidable to inspire proud people's involvement, and technical needs of scaling infrastructures aimed to produce valuable results.