The mass index and mass of the Geminid meteoroid stream as determined with radar, optical and lunar impact data

摘要

The Geminid meteor shower was observed in 2015 using the Western Meteor Physics Group's Canadian Meteor Orbit Radar (CMOR), Marshall Space Flight Center's (MSFC) eight wide-field optical cameras, and telescopes of MSFC's lunar impact monitoring program. These observations allowed Geminid fluxes to be calculated in three unique mass-ranges, from 1.8 x 10(-4) g to 30 g. From these fluxes, a mass index of 1.68 +/- 0.04 was measured. The quantities derived here, along with a profile of the Geminid meteor shower activity in 2015 from CMOR, were used to find a total Geminid mass of 3.5 x 10(7) g the Earth encountered in 2015, along with a minimum total mass for the Geminid meteoroid stream of 1.6 x 10(16) g. Attempts have been made in the past to measure the mass of meteoroid streams using ZHR profiles, but this new and improved treatment uses empirically derived fluxes and measured mass indices for the 2015 encounter with the meteoroid stream. These results are compared to meteoroid stream mass estimate measured for the Perseids of 3.3 x 10(17) g. Instead of three flux values, a single flux value and an assumed mass index of 1.78 was used in Perseid analysis.