When Robert Towers finds a meteorite he gets quite excited. So excited, in fact, that he’ll often do his special Meteorite Dance.

Arms outstretched, Robert will circle his special piece of rock and celebrate the fact that he’s found yet another piece of space debris.

But he never has to worry about people thinking he’s odd because he performs his dance out on the remote Nullarbor Plain, that wonderfully flat and arid expanse where Robert thinks at least a million more pieces of space rock are just waiting to be discovered.

Robert himself has found almost 140 meteorites which technically, under state law, all belong to the South Australian Museum.

All meteorite finds must be reported, and since June 2023 Robert has lodged his finds with the museum in four instalments of 13, 70, 23, and 32 specimens.

This substantial addition increases the known number of South Australian meteorites by more than one-third, from 248 to 386.

Robert’s strong science pedigree (he has degrees in physics and mathematics) has helped him meticulously document each discovery and precisely pinpoint them using GPS.

When the museum’s Senior Collections Manager of Earth Sciences Ben McHenry (pictured above) received an email from Robert telling him he’d collected dozens of meteorites on the Nullarbor he says he was “gobsmacked”.

“It’s even more fascinating that with his skillset and knowledge that we have incredibly accurate descriptions of each meteorite’s GPS location of where it was found,” Ben says.

“All the data he has passed onto us is incredibly detailed and meticulously tracked, which is just incredible.

“We should be able to group together ones that came from the same form, because during a meteor shower the meteorite breaks up as it’s burning as it comes through our atmosphere. They often break up and explode, and so you get a shower of stones over a large area.

“Because Robert has given us the chemical analysis he has conducted on them already, we could plot those against where they were found, and we could see which ones actually came from the same meteorite.”

Ben says that in his 40 years at the museum roughly 10 meteorites had been handed in by members of the public, so to receive more than 100 – complete with thorough data –   is “pretty spectacular”.

The museum presented Robert with a special medallion for his meteorite collecting, something he says he was “thrilled” to receive.

“There is something so humbling about receiving a medallion for doing what you love doing,” he says.

And he says he has no plans to slow down.

”When it’s something you love doing you’re planning your next trip out there by the time you’re turning down your home street,” Robert says.

The trips to the Nullarbor, which along with the Sahara and Antarctica is considered one of the best places in the world to find space rocks, are done in his specially-modified van he’s dubbed the Nullarbor Excursion Mobile.

Complete with a bed and even a fold-out desk, it’s the perfect vehicle to explore the remote region. And while he uses state-of-the art GPS tracking equipment to map his finds, the actual locating of the rocks is a fairly low-tech affair.

“I don’t have any special equipment,” Robert says.

“I go out with my eyes and a cane that has a magnet on the end. You can quickly see if any potential meteorites gravitate towards it, and then I bring it back with me.

“If I think I have found an exceptional meteorite I usually take a selfie and do my special meteorite dance in celebration (pictured right).

“I reckon there are five meteorites per square kilometre on the Nullarbor. It’s 250,000 square kilometres, so there must be a million-plus meteorites still out there.”

Think you might have found a meteorite? Click here for a handy guide or watch this  video.