Meteorite material luminous efficiencies from ground testing of meteoroid entry
S. Loehle, J. Vaubaillon, P. Matlovič, J. Tóth
Icarus
Available online 29 September 2023, 115817
“The paper reports the determination of luminous efficiency values from ground testing of a comprehensive set of meteorite samples. The ground testing data is translated with commonly used ground to flight extrapolation analogies from atmospheric entry maneuver’s engineering into values of a night observation. This results in a meteor at an altitude of 80 km with a flight speed of 11.7 km/s of a 34.8 mm diameter spherical meteoroid. A method is developed to determine the total luminous efficiency in the bands U, B, V, R, and I from the radiance data and the measured mass loss. For the first time, a measurement of luminous efficiency became possible for known materials. The values itself are in the range of 0.01% to 1%, which is in the range of previous studies from meteor measurements.”