A bright bolide produced by a meteoroid follwing a Jupiter family comet orbit

摘要

One of the techniques employed bythe SPanish Meteor Network (SPMN) to monitor thenight sky is based on high-sensitivity CCD video de-vices. These have a limiting magnitude of +3/+4 with-out using any image intensifier. Our meteor networkhas increased the number of such video stations from 2in 2006 to 25 in 2011. Nowadays we perform a con-tinuous monitoring of meteor and fireball activity overSpain and neighbouring regions, which is equivalent toan area of about 500.000 km2. This expansion is beingaccompanied by a considerableeffort to develop sev-eral software packages toaccomplish different tasks,such as the automated operation of some of our sta-tions and the data reduction of the huge amount ofinformation these provide. Besides, favourableweather conditions in Spain combined with the highsensitivity of our systems give us an advantage to per-form this continuous monitoring, which has providedimportant information about meteor and fireball activ-ity. The analysis of bolides is, in fact, one of our pri-orities, as brighter ones can be potential meteorite pro-ducing events and fireballs also may provide usefulinformation about disruption episodes in their parentobjects. In this context, we have imaged on April 27,2011 a double-station sporadic fireball with an abso-lute magnitude of about -7±1. The analysis of this bo-lide is made here.