Perseids Meteor Campaign 2011

It takes only a few of minutes of looking at a dark and clear night sky for someone to experience what is called a “shooting star” or “falling star”. What has really happened is that a tiny bit of dust from outer space entered the Earth's atmosphere and was quickly vaporized. In other words, a Meteor has occurred.

Such particles, or meteoroids, can be seen by a single observer at rate of 1 to 5 per hour every night. These meteoroids form the sporadic background. However, some meteoroids travel around the Sun in streams. Meteoroids belonging to the same stream will have similar orbital and physical characteristics. A closer look at the orbit of showers and comets may indicate that such dust particles originate from comets or in some cases even asteroids. In exceptional cases when a particle is large enough to survive the atmospheric entry, part of it will reach the Earth's surface as a meteorite.

The reason why a small pea-sized object causes such a show in the night sky, is due to its high speed (up to 72 km/sec). Despite its tiny mass, such a fast moving particle has a high kinetic energy which is transformed into light when colliding with the Earth's atmospheric molecules.

It is known that a comet loses parts of its icy components through sublimation upon approaching the Sun. Dust particles embedded in cometary ices are driven by the gas to escape the weak gravity field of the comet and travel on a similar orbit around the Sun. Thus, meteor observations can reveal the nature of cometary matter and the dynamical and physical evolution processes that the meteoroids are subject to during their long journey to the Earth.

Every year the Earth crosses different meteoroid streams producing tens of meteors every hour, or a meteor shower. Shower meteors seem to originate to a visual observer from the same point in the sky, called the radiant. Meteor showers are named after the constellations in which their radiant is located in the sky (e.g. Leonids, Perseids).

Through the Joint Research Activity program of EuroPlanet, funded by the European Union, German Aerospace Agency (DLR) and Technical University of Berlin (TUB) are undergoing testing and validation of state-of-the-art instrumentation which can be used by amateur astronomers in order to contribute scientists with valuable meteor data.

Since 2009, double-station meteor observations have been successfully conducted in Greece, observing the Perseids occurring at 10^th - 14^th of August. Typically, two stations are deployed in Peloponnese peninsula at Mainalon and Parnon, forming a baseline of approximately 50 km, long enough to allow the triangulation of the meteor trajectories. For the meteor observations two Smart Panoramic Optical Sensor Head (SPOSH) cameras are used.

This year, the poorly observed early activity of the shower from 22^nd to 30^th of July will be monitored. The tail is likely made up of grains that were ejected from the comet tens of thousands of years ago, as opposed to the fresher grains that make up the core of the stream. Hence, it offers a window into the earliest phases of the evolution of the stream and its parent object, Halley-type comet 109P/Swift Tuttle. Favored by the sensitivity of the SPOSH cameras, we are expecting to capture tens of Perseids per hour, exposing new information about this part of the stream.

Members of the astronomical clubs of nearby Sparta and Patras will participate in the campaign to ensure the smooth running of the observation campaign in both locations.
The results of the analysis and process of the data acquired in the campaign will be presented in the upcoming joint EPSC-DPS 2011 meeting.