Luminous Efficiency Estimates of Meteors -I. Uncertainty analysis

Dilini Subasinghe, Margaret Campbell-Brown, Edward Stokan

Planetary and Space Science
In Press, Accepted Manuscript, Available online 7 January 2017

LINK

“Highlights
• The uncertainty in the luminous efficiency of meteors is examined.
• Luminous efficiency is sensitive to acceleration, and thus, position measurements.
• A method for determining luminous efficiency is proposed and tested on simulated data.
• The method works well, but needs to be tested on real data.”

“The luminous efficiency of meteors is poorly known, but critical for determining the meteoroid mass. We present an uncertainty analysis of the luminous efficiency as determined by the classical ablation equations, and suggest a possible method for determining the luminous efficiency of real meteor events. We find that a two-term exponential fit to simulated lag data is able to reproduce simulated luminous efficiencies reasonably well.”