Impacts on the Moon: analysis methods and size distribution of impactors
Chrysa Avdellidou, Edhah Munaibari, Raven Larson, Jeremie Vaubaillon, Marco Delbo, Paul Hayne, Mark Wieczorek, Daniel Sheward, Antony Cook
Planetary and Space Science
Available online 4 March 2021
“We are preparing a telescope system to carry out a survey of detection and analysis of lunar impact flashes. In the framework of this project, here we present all necessary methods to automatically identify these luminous events, their lunar impact coordinates, the origin of the impacting meteoroids, as well as the estimation of their physical properties such as mass and size. We tested our methods against confirmed impact events and constructed the meteoroid size frequency distribution of impactors using literature data of the last 20 years. In addition, we present the first lunar impact event observed from the Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur that was detected during the testing phase of our project.”
