Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
Dec 2007
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2007dps....39.4006d&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #39, #40.06; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 39, p.493
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
Scientific paper
In the fall of 2005, a dedicated meteor observing campaign was carried out by the Panoramic Camera (Pancam) onboard the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) Spirit to determine the viability of using MER cameras as meteor detectors and to obtain the first experimental estimate of the meteoroid flux at Mars. Our observing targets included both the sporadic meteoroid background and two predicted martian meteor showers: one associated with comet 1P/Halley and a potential stream associated with 2001/R1 LONEOS. A total of 353 images covering 2.7 h of net exposure time were analyzed with no conclusive meteor detections. From these data, we estimate the upper limit to the background meteoroid flux at Mars to be < 4.4 x 10-6 meteoroids km-2hr-1 for meteoroids with mass larger than 4 g. The estimated flux to this same mass limit at the Earth is 10-6 meteoroids km-2hr-1(Grün et al. 1985). This result is qualitatively consistent, within error bounds, with theoretical models predicting martian fluxes of 50% that at Earth for meteoroids of mass 10-3-101 g (Adolfsson et al. 1996). Our analysis also suggests that the event reported as the first martian meteor (Selsis et al. 2005) is more likely to be a grazing cosmic ray impact, which we found to be a major source of confusion with potential meteors in all Pancam images.
Domokos, A., Bell III, J.F., Brown, P., Lemmon, M.T., Suggs, R., Vaubaillon, J., 2007. Measurement of the Meteoroid Flux at Mars. Icarus, in press. doi: 10.1016/j.icarus.2007.04.017
Bell James Francis III
Brown Patrick
Cooke William
Domokos Andrea
Lemmon Mark Thomas
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