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arXiv · 2409.19503

A Multi-station Meteor Monitoring (M$^3$) System. I. Design and Testing

Z. Li·H. Zou·J. Liu·J. Ma·X. Zhao·X. Li·Z. Tu·B. Zhang·R. Wang·S. Wang·Marco Xue
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Abstract

Meteors carry important and indispensable information about the interplanetary environment, which can be used to understand the origin and evolution of our solar system. We have developed a Multi-station Meteor Monitoring ($\rm M^3$) system that can observe almost the entire sky and detect meteors automatically, and it determines their trajectories. They are highly extensible to construct a large-scale network. Each station consists of a waterproof casing, a wide field-of-view lens with a CMOS camera, and a supporting computer. The camera has a built-in GPS module for accurately timing the meteoroid entry into the atmosphere (accurate to 1 $\mu$s), which is the most prominent characteristic compared with other existing meteor monitoring devices. We have also developed a software package that can efficiently identify and measure meteors appearing in the real-time video stream and compute the orbits of meteoroids in the solar system via multi-station observations. During the Geminid meteor shower in 2021, the M$^3$ system was tested at two stations ($\sim$55 km apart) in the suburbs of Beijing. The test results show that the astrometric accuracy is about 0.3-0.4 arcmin. About 800 meteors were detected by these two stations. A total of 473 meteors have their orbits calculated by our software, and 377 of them belong to the Geminid meteoroid stream. Our M$^3$ system will be further tested and upgraded, and it will be used to construct a large monitoring network in China in the future.

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Z. Li, H. Zou, J. Liu, J. Ma, X. Zhao, X. Li, Z. Tu, B. Zhang, R. Wang, S. Wang, Marco Xue. 2024-09-29. A Multi-station Meteor Monitoring (M$^3$) System. I. Design and Testing. https://doi.org/10.1117/1.jatis.10.4.044003

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