A Multi-station Meteor Monitoring (M$^3$) System. I. Design and Testing

TL;DR

The paper presents the design, testing, and initial results of a multi-station meteor monitoring system capable of automatic detection and trajectory calculation, with high timing accuracy, demonstrated during the Geminid meteor shower.

Contribution

This work introduces a highly extensible multi-station meteor monitoring system with GPS-synchronized cameras and real-time processing, enabling large-scale sky coverage and precise orbit determination.

Findings

Detected approximately 800 meteors during testing

Achieved astrometric accuracy of about 0.3-0.4 arcmin

Successfully identified and calculated orbits for 473 meteors

Abstract

Meteors carry important and indispensable information about the interplanetary environment, which can be used to understand the origin and evolution of our solar system. We have developed a Multi-station Meteor Monitoring ($\rm M^3$) system that can observe almost the entire sky and detect meteors automatically, and it determines their trajectories. They are highly extensible to construct a large-scale network. Each station consists of a waterproof casing, a wide field-of-view lens with a CMOS camera, and a supporting computer. The camera has a built-in GPS module for accurately timing the meteoroid entry into the atmosphere (accurate to 1 $\mu$s), which is the most prominent characteristic compared with other existing meteor monitoring devices. We have also developed a software package that can efficiently identify and measure meteors appearing in the real-time video stream and compute the orbits of meteoroids in the solar system via multi-station observations. During the Geminid meteor shower in 2021, the M$^3$ system was tested at two stations ($\sim$55 km apart) in the suburbs of Beijing. The test results show that the astrometric accuracy is about 0.3-0.4 arcmin. About 800 meteors were detected by these two stations. A total of 473 meteors have their orbits calculated by our software, and 377 of them belong to the Geminid meteoroid stream. Our M$^3$ system will be further tested and upgraded, and it will be used to construct a large monitoring network in China in the future.