Thursday 5 April 2012

OT: a multistation filmed meteor from 27 March - some results on the trajectory

In the early morning of March 27, while waiting for a pass of ATV-3, I accidentally filmed a nice meteor from Leiden. As it turned out, the same meteor was also filmed by the meteor surveillance video of Martin Breukers in Hengelo. Hence, we have this approximately mag. -1.3 meteor multistation, allowing triangulation to determine the 3-dimensional atmospheric trajectory and orbit in the solar system. Martin used UFOanalyzer software to process the images and arrive at an atmospheric trajectory. I used my orbital spreadsheet Metorb85 to compute a heliocentric orbit for the meteor.



The movie above shows the meteor footage as obtained from Leiden and Hengelo, plus a 360-degree fly-by around the reconstructed atmospheric trajectory.

The meteor started at 51.745 N, 6.267 E, at 100.4 km altitude. It ended at 51.961 N, 6.707 E and 75.2 km altitude. It had an initial velocity of 27.8 km/s.







Above are two integrated frames images of the meteor, a still image showing the 3D trajectory, and images showing the orbit in the solar system. As the convergence angle between the trails as seen from both video stations was not particularly large, the resulting orbit has some inaccuracy. Nominal orbital element values are:

a = 1.87 AU,
q = 0.450 AU,
e = 0.759,
i = 10.47 deg,
omega = 285.84 deg,
node = 6.696 deg.

The geocentric radiant was near RA 198.20 deg, dec. +4.01 deg, Vgeo 25.67 km/s. The radiant position has some leeway due to the low convergence angle. Hengelo saw the meteor appear in Corona Borealis: Leiden in the Aquila-Sagitta-Delphinus border area.

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