Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Observation And Modelling Of Meter-Class Earth Impacting Asteroids, David L. Clark

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Earth is constantly bombarded by solar system objects of a wide variety of sizes, from micron-sized meteoroid stream and sporadic meteor dust, to meter-sized and larger meteoroids observed as fireballs. Fireball event characteristics directly point to the properties and structure of the parent body from which the meteoroid originated. In-atmosphere fireball data paired with in-space observations bring much context to both observations. This thesis centres on three published papers that grew out of my Masters project to identify precovery in-space images of meteoroids first observed as fireballs.

The first article describes the first successful identification of an in-space image of …

Physical Dispersions Of Meteor Showers Through High Precision Optical Observations, Denis Vida

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Meteoroids ejected from comets form meteoroid streams which disperse over time due to gravitational perturbations and non-gravitational forces. When stream meteoroids collide with the Earth's atmosphere, they are visible as meteors emanating from a common point-like area (radiant) in the sky. Measuring the size of meteor shower radiant areas can provide insight into stream formation and age. The tight radiant dispersion of young streams are difficult to determine due to measurement error, but if successfully measured, the dispersion could be used to constrain meteoroid ejection velocities from their parent comets. The estimated ejection velocity is an uncertain, model-dependent value with …

Physical Properties Of Faint Meteors Through High-Resolution Observations, Dilini Subasinghe

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Small, faint meteors (with masses between 10^-7 and 10^-4 kg) were once part of an asteroid or comet, and collide with Earth's atmosphere daily. Studying meteors is an effective way to survey the physical properties of their parent bodies. Meteor light curves and orbital information is easily obtained from wide-field observations, from which meteoroid structure can be inferred through meteoroid ablation modelling. A high-resolution narrow-field camera can provide much more detail about the poorly understood ablation processes and physical properties of the meteoroid. The goal of this thesis is to better understand the physical properties of meteors using …