Leonids campaign 2002 of ESA/RSSD

Introduction

This year, two of our teams will go again to Spain, just as in 1999. Hopefully with some lessons learnt from that year and from 2001… In addition, we have organized forward-scatter radio observations done from the Netherlands. We expect to observe the European peak with video cameras and the radio, and both the European and the US peak via the measurement of the electric field of the atmosphere. If you are interested in when the peaks are expected, have a look at the excellent at Hiroshi Ogawa's web site. We here give an overview over what we plan to do, the people involved, and useful links mainly for our own interest but of course anybody is welcome to follow what we are doing.

Overview over our campaign

Our science goals (for the meteor campaign) are:

Primary:

Participate in the determination of number rates vs. magnitude (using image-intesified video cameras).
Study the physical properties of individual meteors by measuring their light curves and velocity profiles and compare these to other streams (again, image-intesified video cameras).
Obtain spectra of meteors to determine the chemical composition of the meteoroids.
Perform E-field measurements to see whether bright meteors can induce Schuhmann-resonances in the atmosphere.
Provide real-time flux measurements to the European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) by flying an image-intensified camera on a US airplane (Leonid MAC)

Secondary goals:

Support a team proposing to do the same with the Millimeter telescope (IRAM) near by
Study the fine structure of the radiant using the ESA Optical Ground Station on Teneriffe

Initially, we also wanted to measure high-resolution spectra of persistent trails with the 1.5-m-telescope of the Grenada Observatory. However, the spectrograph of the telescope cannot be used right now, it will be fixed only around March next year. So we loose this chance…

Outreach events:

· Jean-Pierre Lebreton has set up a forward-scatter radio experiment, with the BBC in England continually transmitting a carrier signal all night. One recording station is located at ESTEC. See the dedicated page on this web site (link to come).

· The European Space Agency’s PROBA spacecraft has a camera on board, which we’ll use to look at the upper atmosphere. The camera has only 0.5 deg field of view and is not very fast (f/20), but we will give it a try anyway.

More details

For more details, follow these links:

The team
Our trip to Spain
Graphical overview over our cameras in Spain (to come)
Power requirements of our systems
Location of our observing sites