A Multi-station Meteor Monitoring (M$^3$) System. II. system upgrade and a pathfinder network

TL;DR

This paper presents the upgrade of a multi-station meteor monitoring network in China, including new station designs, software, and a data platform, resulting in extensive meteor orbit data and insights into meteoroid streams and velocities.

Contribution

The paper introduces a new meteor network in China with multi-camera stations, integrated software, and a data platform, expanding meteor observation capabilities and data analysis.

Findings

Detected 8,683 meteor orbits in 10 months.

Half of the orbits are related to established meteoroid streams.

Velocity distribution shows bimodal peaks consistent with previous studies.

Abstract

Meteors are important phenomenon reflecting many properties of interplanetary dust particles. The study of their origin, mass distribution, and orbit evolution all require large data volume, which can only be obtained using large meteor networks. After meteor networks in Europe and America, we present our designs and upgrades of a proposing network in China. The new designs are mainly aimed for facilitating data gathering process. Each of the newly designed meteor stations now can support up to 4 cameras to cover the full sky. Newer version of meteor station software now works as an integral system, which can streamline the process of detecting, measuring and uploading meteors. We have built a meteor data platform to store, process and display the meteor data automatically. The software and data platform are designed to be easy to learn and use, so it can attract more people to join and operate meteor stations. Four stations are installed as the first phase of the network, and during the operation in 10 months, the network detected 8,683 orbits, and we find that half of the orbits can be related to established meteoroid streams. The statistical analysis of sporadic meteoroids shows a bimodal distribution of the velocities, which coincides with previous studies. The distribution of Tisserand parameters, $T_j$, shows the two peaks at $T_j=0$ and 3, indicating the different orbits of parent bodies (isotropic and ecliptic), which are divided by $T_j=2$. The falling trajectory of a meteorite was also predicted using observational data of the network. We are currently expanding the network, and in the future we will carry out detailed analysis of the key parameters of the distribution of the meteoroids.