2011 Workshop: Meteors

Each day billions of meteoric particles undergo a dynamic evolution as they enter the Earth’s atmosphere. The vast majority of these entering particles, referred to as meteoroids, evaporate completely in the upper atmosphere depositing mass, energy and an array of constituents. During the ablation process, these particles form a dense plasma around the meteoroid, known as a head-echo. This plasma evolves into a persistent trail of plasma that diffuses into the background atmosphere. This observed phenomena is a meteor. Meteors have been documented since ancient times and have been studied scientifically for well over a century, yet many outstanding questions remain. Basic characteristics such as the amount of material deposited into Earth’s atmosphere, and meteoroid physical and astronomical properties are still debated. In addition, the impact of this incoming flux on upper atmospheric chemistry and ionization processes are still under investigation. Meteors are of significant value to the CEDAR community because meteors account for all of the dust, neutral metal and ionized particles in the upper atmosphere. They also provide a means to infer upper atmospheric winds and to a degree temperature via remote sensing techniques, which is a focus area of CEDAR researchers. Further, meteoric dust is also thought to provide the condensation nuclei for several MLT phenomena such as polar mesospheric clouds PMC (high altitude clouds near 80 km), which is the focus of a current NASA mission (AIM).

To address the outstanding questions currently under investigation in the field of meteor science, we invite presentations on the physics of meteors and their impact effects on the atmosphere and ionosphere, as well as engineering techniques for observing and characterizing the meteoroid population. We encourage presentations using any data set, i.e., lidar, radar, satellite, and optical, as well as theoretical modeling of meteoroid impact effects.

This year we will continue a panel discussion begun in 2009 on the following topic. " How do we make sense of non-smooth radar “light curves”?” and by extension “what are the implications of these atmospheric interactions on mass deposition and processes in the ionosphere?” This topic has been the result of a number of recent papers, and disagreement between different researchers. We look forward to a lively and informative discussion amongst panel and audience members.