The new ESA meteoroid model

Abstract

The orbital distributions of meteoroids in interplanetary space are revised in the ESA meteoroid model to account for recently obtained observational data and to comply with the constraints due to the orbital evolution under planetary gravity and Poynting–Robertson effects. Infrared observations of the zodiacal cloud by the COBE DIRBE instrument, in situ flux measurements by the dust detectors on board Galileo and Ulysses spacecraft, and the crater size distributions on lunar rock samples retrieved by the Apollo missions are synthesized into a single model. Within the model, the orbital distributions are expanded into a sum of contributions due to a number of known sources, including the asteroid belt with the emphasis on the prominent families Themis, Koronis, Eos and Veritas, as well as comets on Jupiter-encountering orbits. An attempt to incorporate the meteor orbit database acquired by the AMOR radar is also discussed.