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Optical Detection of Large Meteoroids in Space

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 April 2016

H.A. Zook  and
A.E. Potter
H.A. Zook
Affiliation:
NASA Johnson Space Center, Houston, Texas 77058, USA
A.E. Potter
Affiliation:
NASA Johnson Space Center, Houston, Texas 77058, USA

Abstract

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CCD sensors placed across the focal plane of large Schmidt telescopes have great potential for detecting and measuring the very low flux in space of meteoroids with diameters larger than 1 meter. With the Palomar “Big Schmidt”, a detection rate of 1.4 per hour is obtained for meteoroids between 0.6 and 200 meters in diameter. For the Baker-Nunn “Satellite Tracking Camera”, the corresponding rate is about 0.8 per hour. The key to obtaining such high detection rates derives from approximately setting the sensor integration time equal to the time it takes a meteoroid to cross a pixel field of view. This minimizes signal to noise problems and is accomplished, in practice, by multiple summing of short integration time data records to obtain data records of longer effective integration times.

Type
V. Relationships to Comets and Meteoroids
Information
International Astronomical Union Colloquium , Volume 85: Properties and Interactions of Interplanetary Dust , 1985 , pp. 293 - 298
Copyright
Copyright © Reidel 1985

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