Speaker
Description
Meteoroids, as fragments of small Solar System bodies altered by collisions, rotation, and thermal processes, impact the Earth’s on a daily basis. Upon their atmospheric entry, they produce light, ionization, and shock waves detectable across multiple sensors.
Over the past two decades, wide-field optical networks (e.g., video/fireball arrays), infrasound and seismic arrays, and space-based sensors have greatly expanded coverage and precision.
This talk outlines practical workflows: combining sightings from multiple cameras to reconstruct the path and speed; using calibrated brightness to estimate energy and mass; and following the final fall to guide meteorite recovery and laboratory study. Drawing on recent re-analyses of well-documented falls, we show that the total light produced closely tracks the object’s kinetic energy, despite the various fragmentation profile of the impact. The resulting methodology provides updated constraints on the flux of large meteoroids onto Earth, and a roadmap for next-generation continental-scale networks and real-time alerts.
| Stream | Science or Engineering |
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