Asta Pellinen-Wannberg

Meteor observations with the European Incoherent Scatter UHF Radar

The European Incoherent Scatter (EISCAT) UHF radar, which operates at a nominal frequency of 930 MHz, is introduced as a powerful meteor radar. Its high sensitivity is utilized to detect transient enhanced ionization trails caused by meteors of all orientations, in contrast to conventional HF and VHF backscatter radars, which observe only the meteor trails oriented approximately normal to the radar beam. A comparison shows that EISCAT observes almost as high hourly rates of meteors as meteor radars do, in spite of its beamwidth being only 0.5° compared to their 100°. Two different kinds of echoes are seen in the data. About three fourths of them are strongly Doppler-shifted transient echoes, which we interpret as head echoes, since they move with meteor velocities. The remaining echoes are long-lived. They come from the ionized trails left behind the meteors, which drift slowly or not at all. There are fundamental differences between the scattering process producing both types of echoes and the scattering from trails observed with the meteor radars. For example, we have never seen the trail echoes appear after a head echo. All our shower echoes are also strongly nonspecular. We postulate that some time is required for the trails to expand and for the ionization within them to approach the thermal equilibrium state in order to give detectable incoherent echoes. Due to the very small beamwidth our radar cannot follow the motion of an individual meteor, as the conventional radars can, but we can obtain a statistical profile of what happens at different heights as the meteoroids penetrate the atmosphere. The altitude distribution of ionized trails shows that they are observable over the whole measurement range from about 65 to 165 km, while the head echoes can be detected only within a narrow altitude range. The latter effect is probably related to the radio meteor ceiling effect.

Three‐dimensional radar observation of a submillimeter meteoroid fragmentation

A meteor observed with the naked eye is colloquially called a shooting star. The streak of light is generated by an extra-terrestrial particle, a meteoroid, entering the Earth’s atmosphere. The term meteor includes both luminosity detectable by optical means and ionization detectable by radar. The radar targets of meteor head echoes have the same motion as the meteoroids on their atmospheric flight and are relatively independent of aspect angle. They appear to be compact regions of plasma created at around 100 km altitude and have no appreciable duration. This thesis reviews the meteor head echo observations carried out with the tristatic 930 MHz EISCAT UHF radar system during four 24h runs between 2002 and 2005, and a 6h run in 2003 with the monostatic 224 MHz EISCAT VHF radar. It contains the first strong observational evidence of a submillimeter-sized meteoroid breaking apart into two distinct fragments. This discovery promises to be useful in the further understanding of the interaction processes of meteoroids with the Earth’s atmosphere and thus also the properties of interplanetary/interstellar dust. The tristatic capability of the EISCAT UHF system makes it a unique tool for investigating the physical properties of meteoroids and the meteor head echo scattering process. The thesis presents a method for determining the position of a compact radar target in the common volume of the antenna beams and demonstrates its applicability for meteor studies. The inferred positions of the meteor targets are used to estimate their velocities, decelerations, directions of arrival and radar cross sections (RCS) with unprecedented accuracy. The head echoes are detected at virtually all possible aspect angles all the way out to 130° from the meteoroid trajectory, limited by the antenna pointing directions. The RCS of individual meteors simultaneously observed with the three receivers are equal within the accuracy of the measurements with a very slight trend suggesting that the RCS decreases with increasing aspect angle. A statistical evaluation of the measurement technique shows that the determined Doppler velocity agrees with the target range rate. This demonstrates that no contribution from slipping plasma is detected and that the Doppler velocities are unbiased within the measurement accuracy. The velocities of the detected meteoroids are in the range of 19-70 km/s, but with very few detections at velocities below 30 km/s. The thesis compares observations with a numerical single-body ablation model, which simulates the physical processes during meteoroid flight through the atmosphere. The estimated meteoroid masses are in the range of 10-9 - 10-5.5 kg.

On the meteoric head echo radar cross section angular dependence

We present radar cross section (RCS) measurements of meteor head echoes observed with the tristatic 930 MHz EISCAT UHF radar system. The three receivers offer a unique possibility to accurately com ...

Enhanced ion-acoustic echoes from meteor trails

Abstract Some spectral echoes with short-living asymmetric ion-acoustic peaks, observed with the EISCAT UHF radar, are interpreted to be of meteoric origin. Under certain conditions meteor trails can scatter radio waves incoherently. Already a meteor of about 3 mm size causes enough ionisation that a diffusing trail after tens of seconds still can have enhanced ionisation. By this time the expansion rate of the trail radius per experiment integration time is small compared to the total radius. The enhanced plasma inside the trail approaches thermal equilibrium and can sustain ion-acoustic waves. A qualitative model for incoherent scatter from meteor trails is proposed, and a few examples of trail echoes are presented. They show strongly asymmetric incoherent ion-line spectra, which we assume to result from the Doppler shift caused by heavy meteoric ions in the drifting trail. The relation to other observations of enhanced ion-acoustic waves in connection to auroral displays is discussed. The applicability of the proposed model to the data is evaluated.

Optical observations of water in Leonid meteor trails

[1] Two simultaneous filtered images (589 and 423 nm) of a meteor trail were recorded during the 2002 Leonid storm. The first image shows Na atoms and the second Ca and Fe atoms and signals at altitudes much higher than can give rise to ablation of metals, in agreement with other observations of high altitude visible trails [Spurný et al., 2000a; Spurný et al., 2000b]. Ablation models [McNeil et al., 1998] and analysis of the history of the 2002 Leonid meteoroids [McNaught and Asher, 1999] support the conclusion that the high altitude emissions are due to H 2 O + and H α,β,γ formed through the decomposition in the hyperthermal collision between H 2 O from meteoroid ice [Kresak, 1973] and atmospheric N 2 [Dressier et al., 1992].

Photometric and ionization masses of meteors with simultaneous EISCAT UHF radar and intensified video observations

There are significant uncertainties in the calculation of photometric and ionization masses of meteors, particularly those derived from meteor head echoes observed by high power, large aperture rad ...

Detection of meteoroid hypervelocity impacts on the Cluster spacecraft: First results

We present the first study of dust impact events on one of the Earth-orbiting Cluster satellites. The events were identified in the measurements of the wide band data (WBD) instrument on board the ...

The solar cycle effect on the atmosphere as a scintillator for meteor observations

We discuss using high solar cycle atmospheric conditions as sensors for observing meteors and their properties. High altitude meteor trails (HAMTs) have sometimes been observed with HPLA (High Power Large Aperture) radars. At other times they are not seen. In the absence of systematic studies on this topic, we surmise that the reason might be differing atmospheric conditions during the observations. At EISCAT HAMTs were observed in 1990 and 1991. Very high meteor trails were observed with Israeli L-band radars in 1998, 1999 and 2001. Through the Leonid activity, around the latest perihelion passage of comet Tempel-Tuttle, optical meteors as high as 200 km were reported. This was partly due to new and better observing methods. However, all the reported periods of high altitude meteors seem to correlate with solar cycle maximum. The enhanced atmospheric and ionospheric densities extend the meteoroid interaction range with the atmosphere along its path, offering a better possibility to distinguish differential ablation of the various meteoric constituents. This should be studied during the next solar maximum, due within a few years.

Strong E region ionization caused by the 1767 trail during the 2002 Leonids

Intensive E region ionization extending up to 140 km altitude and lasting for several hours was observed with the European Incoherent Scatter (EISCAT) UHF radar during the 2002 Leonids meteor shower maximum. The level of global geomagnetic disturbance as well as the local geomagnetic and auroral activity in northern Scandinavia were low during the event. Thus, the ionization cannot be explained by intensive precipitation. The layer was 30–40 km thick, so it cannot be classified as a sporadic E layer which are typically just a few kilometers wide. Incoherent scatter radars have not to date reported any notable meteor shower-related increases in the average background ionization. The 2002 Leonids storm flux, however, was so high that it might have been able to induce such an event. The Chemical Ablation Model is used to estimate deposition rates of individual meteors. The resulting electron production, arising from hyperthermal collisions of ablated atoms with atmospheric molecules, is related to the predicted Leonid flux values and observed ionization on 19 November 2002. The EISCAT Svalbard Radar (ESR) located at some 1000 km north of the UHF site did not observe any excess ionization during the same period. The high-latitude electrodynamic conditions recorded by the SuperDARN radar network show that the ESR was within a strongly drifting convection cell continuously fed by fresh plasma while the UHF radar was outside the polar convection region maintaining the ionization.

Potential of Earth Orbiting Spacecraft Influenced by Meteoroid Hypervelocity Impacts

Detection of hypervelocity impacts on a spacecraft body using electric field instruments has been established as a new method for monitoring of dust grains in our solar system. Voyager, WIND, Cassini, and STEREO spacecraft have shown that this technique can be a complementary method to conventional dust detectors. This approach uses fast short time changes in the spacecraft potential generated by hypervelocity dust impacts, which can be detected by monopole electric field instruments as a pulse in the measured electric field. The shape and the duration of the pulse strongly depend on parameters of the ambient plasma environment. This fact is very important for Earth orbiting spacecraft crossing various regions of the Earth’s magnetosphere where the concentration and the temperature of plasma particles change significantly. We present the numerical simulations of spacecraft charging focused on changes in the spacecraft potential generated by dust impacts in various locations of the Earth’s magnetosphere. We show that identical dust impacts generate significantly larger pulses in regions with lower electron density. We discuss the influence of the photoelectron distribution for dust impact detections showing that a small amount of energetic photoelectrons significantly increases the potential of the spacecraft body and the pulse duration. We also show that the active spacecraft potential control (ASPOC) instrument onboard the cluster spacecraft strongly reduces the amplitude and the duration of the pulse resulting in difficulties of dust detection when ASPOC is ON. Simulation of dust impacts is compared with pulses detected by the Earth orbiting cluster spacecraft in the last part of Section III.