Meteoroid orbits from video meteors. The case of the Geminid stream

Abstract

We use the Slovak and Czech video meteor observations, as well as video meteoroid orbits collected in the CAMS, SonotaCo, EDMOND and DMS catalogues, for an analysis of the distribution of meteoroid orbits within the stream of the Geminids and of the dispersion of their radiants. We concentrate on the influence of the measurement errors on the precision of the orbits obtained from the video networks that are based on various meteor-detection software packages and various meteor orbital element softwares.The Geminids radiant dispersion obtained from the large video catalogues reaches the dispersion of the radio observed Geminids, whereby the diffused marginal regions are affected mostly by meteoroids with extreme values (small or large) of the semi-major axes. Meteoroids of shorter semi-major axes concentrate at the eastern side of the radiant area and those of longer semi-major axes at the western part.The observed orbital dispersions in the Geminid stream described by the median absolute deviation range from 0.029 to 0.042 AU−1 for the video catalogues. The distribution of the semi-major axes of video meteors in all the databases, except for the Ondřejov (Czech) data, seem to be systematically biased in comparison with the photographic and radio meteors. The determined velocities of the video data are underestimated, probably as a consequence of the methods used for the positional and velocity measurements. The largest shift is observed in the EDMOND and SonotaCo catalogues.Except for the measurement errors which influence the analyses and their interpretations, we also point out the problem of the uncertainties of the numerical integration procedures that influence the simulations' results. Several experimental integrations of the Geminids parent asteroid, which we performed from the present to the past and then back to the year 2015, showed that a complete reproduction, including also the mean anomaly, is only possible for a time span of about 2700years.