Feasibility of meteor surveying from a Venus orbiter

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that a meteor survey from a Venus orbiter is feasible using existing or upcoming instruments, which could significantly enhance understanding of meteoroid flux in the inner solar system.

Contribution

It applies a physical model and survey simulation to show that Venus orbit meteor detection is practical with current technology, providing a new method for studying meteoroid populations.

Findings

Venus meteors are predicted to be brighter and higher in the atmosphere than Earth meteors.

A Venus orbiter could detect 1.5 to 2.5 times more meteors than Earth-based observations.

Detection rates are robust against variations in orbit and instrument parameters.

Abstract

Meteor and bolide phenomena caused by the atmospheric ablation of incoming meteoroids are predicted to occur at the planet Venus. Their systematic observation would allow to measure and compare the sub-mm to m meteoroid flux at different locations in the solar system. Using a physical model of atmospheric ablation, we demonstrate that Venus meteors would be brighter, shorter-lived, and appear higher in the atmosphere than Earth meteors. To investigate the feasibility of meteor detection at Venus from an orbiter, we apply the SWARMS survey simulator tool to sets of plausible meteoroid population parameters, atmospheric models and instrument designs suited to the task, such as the Mini-EUSO camera operational on the ISS since 2019. We find that such instrumentation would detect meteors at Venus with a 1.5x to 2.5x higher rate than at Earth. The estimated Venus-Earth detection ratio remains insensitive to variations in the chosen observation orbit and detector characteristics, implying that a meteor survey from Venus orbit is feasible, though contingent on the availability of suitable algorithms and methods for efficient on-board processing and downlinking of the meteor data to Earth. We further show that a hypothetical camera onboard the upcoming EnVision mission to Venus similar to the ISS instrument should detect many times more meteors than needed for an initial characterisation of the large meteoroid population at 0.7 au from the Sun.