Potential direct observation of meteoroid fragmentation by a high range resolution radar

Abstract

In the development of Sanya Incoherent Scatter Radar (SYISR), which is a major scientific instrument project founded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), we established a prototype system of 8 subarrays (named SYISR-8 hereafter), including 256 transceiver modules totally, beginning in July 2018 to verify the functions of the radar. Based on SYISR-8, we configured the system to detect the meteor echo with high range resolution. During a continuous observation interval of 16 h, 55 meteor echo events were found. Among these events, 34 cases were head echoes, 18 cases were specular trail echoes, and 3 cases were head echo and nonspecular trail echo concurrent events. We have observed 2 potential direct meteoroid fragmentation cases of all 55 meteor events. It demonstrates that potential direct observation of meteoroid fragmentation could be observed by a relatively small aperture and power using pulse compression processing. However, the occurrence ratio of meteoroid fragmentation in our experiment is approximately 6%, which is considerably lower than that observed in previous studies, which needs further investigation.