High resolution radiant distribution and orbits of sporadic radar meteoroids

Abstract

Five years of meteor orbit data from CMOR (the Canadian Meteor Orbit Radar) are used to study the high-resolution orbital structure of the sporadic meteoroid complex. The large number of high quality orbits (2.35 million) allows the orbital characteristics of meteoroids to be studied not only in the five sporadic sources accessible from the latitude of London, Ontario, Canada, but at a resolution of 2 degrees. The radiant distribution of sporadic meteors is investigated, applying corrections for observing biases, and weighting to a constant limiting mass, and to a constant limiting energy. The orbital distribution of the sporadic sources is compared to other studies. The variation of average geocentric speed, semimajor axis, eccentricity, inclination and perihelion distance with meteoroid radiant is investigated. The source of a ring depleted in meteor radiants at 55 degrees from the apex is attributed to shorter collisional lifetimes inside the ring, due to a higher probability of catastrophic collisions with particles in the zodiacal cloud for the predominantly retrograde meteoroids inside the ring.