Lecturer: Johan Kero (UmU) Date: 2012-03-01 10:30 Place: Aniara
The Shigaraki MU radar meteor head echo observation programme
Johan Kero
Umeå universitet
Abstract
Earth's atmosphere is daily bombarded by billions of dust-sized
particles. Those larger than a few tenths of a millimetre give rise to
visible streaks of light on the night sky, meteors, or colloquially
shooting stars. Meteor science contains many open questions, and the
flux of extraterrestrial material into the Earth's atmosphere is one
of them.
High-power MST radars are powerful tools for providing new insights.
This talk contains a review of meteor head echo observations with the
46.5 MHz Shigaraki Middle and Upper atmosphere (MU) radar in Japan
(34.85N, 136.10E). We conducted a systematic set of monthly 24 h
observations from 2009 June to 2010 December (>500 h) resulting in
more than 100,000 high-quality meteor detections.
Meteor showers are caused by the Earth intersecting streams of
meteoroids on orbits still very similar to those of their parent
bodies, usually comets. Meteor showers provide opportunities to
compare head echo observations with other observation techniques and
simulations. Such comparisons indicate that the head echo radar method
provides precision and accuracy comparable to the photographic
reduction of much brighter meteors with longer detectable
trajectories.
Created 2012-02-17 08:42:02 by Uwe Raffalski Last changed 2012-02-22 09:19:38 by Mats Holmström
