Bibcode
Bellot Rubio, Luis R.; Martínez González, María Jesús; Ruiz Herrera, Lola; Licandro, Javier; Martínez Delgado, David; Rodríguez Gil, Pablo; Serra-Ricart, Miquel
Bibliographical reference
In: Proceedings of the Meteoroids 2001 Conference, 6 - 10 August 2001, Kiruna, Sweden. Ed.: Barbara Warmbein. ESA SP-495, Noordwijk: ESA Publications Division, ISBN 92-9092-805-0, 2001, p. 525 - 529
Advertised on:
11
2001
Citations
1
Refereed citations
1
Description
Faint meteors observed with Super-Schmidt cameras are re-examined in
order to assess whether their dynamical and photometric behavior can be
described by means of the single body theory. Velocities, decelerations
and magnitudes are fitted simultaneously to synthetic curves resulting
from integration of the appropriate set of differential equations. The
parameters determined by this procedure are the ablation coefficient,
the shape-density coefficient and the preatmospheric mass of the
meteoroids. It turns out that 64% of the meteors analyzed here are
reasonably well described by this theory, suggesting that they did not
undergo significant fragmentation during their atmospheric flight. We
identify some systematic differences between observed and theoretical
light curves of meteors for which the fit is good. From the retrieved
shape-density coefficients we derive meteoroid bulk densities. The
average density turns out to be 1.0 g cm-3, with individual
values ranging from 0.2 g cm-3 to 1.4 g cm-3. This
work represent a first step toward the analysis of low-light level video
observations of very small meteoroids.