The MU radar meteor head echo observation programme
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. We present comparisons indicating that the head echo radar method provides precision and accuracy comparable to the photographic reduction of much brighter meteors with longer detectable trajectories.
- Publication:
-
39th COSPAR Scientific Assembly
- Pub Date:
- July 2012
- Bibcode:
- 2012cosp...39..909K