Abstract
This manuscript represents a review on progress made over the past decade concerning our understanding of meteoroid bombardment on airless solar system bodies as one of the sources of the formation of their exospheres. Specifically, observations at Mercury by MESSENGER and at the Moon by LADEE, together with progress made in dynamical models of the meteoroid environment in the inner solar system, offer new tools to explore in detail the physical phenomena involved in this complex relationship. This progress is timely given the expected results during the next decade that will be provided by new missions such as DESTINY+, BepiColombo, the Artemis program or the Lunar Gateway.
Highlights
The influence of interplanetary dust on planetary bodies is an ubiquitous phenomenon in the solar system
Observing meteors is most likely an activity practiced by humanity since its beginnings, and it is natural to start describing the meteoroid environment with what we have learned from Earth-based meteor studies
This effort concluded that ∼ 20% of the asymmetry present in Lunar Dust Experiment (LDEX) measurements is due to unaccounted-for biases introduced by the orientation of the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) spacecraft orbit with respect to the selenographic latitudes where the ejecta cloud produced by JFC meteoroids is largest
Summary
The influence of interplanetary dust on planetary bodies is an ubiquitous phenomenon in the solar system. Meteoroids heat up as they interact with an increasingly denser atmosphere while decelerating If they are sufficiently large (>30 μm in radius) they will ablate most of their material in the atmospheric aerobraking region, introducing exotic species such as Mg, Fe, and Na into the atmosphere (CarrilloSánchez et al 2020; Crismani et al 2018, 2017; Grebowsky et al 2002, 2017; Plane 2003; Berezhnoy and Borovicka 2010). For this case, the ablation processes will result in ionization and/or photon production, generating the well known meteor phenomenon (Ceplecha et al 1998).
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