Meteoroid Engineering Model (MEM) 3: NASAs Newest Meteoroid Model

Meteoroid impacts threaten spacecraft and astronauts at all locations within the Solar System. At certain altitudes in low-Earth orbit, orbital debris dominates the risk, but meteoroids are more significant within 250 km of the Earths surface and above 4000 km [1]. In interplanetary space, orbital debris is nonexistent and meteoroids constitute the entire population of potentially dangerous impactors. The NASA Meteoroid Environment Office (MEO) produces the Meteoroid Engineering Model (MEM) to support meteoroid impact risk assessments [2]; MEM is a stand-alone piece of software that describes the flux, speed, directionality, and bulk density of meteoroids striking a spacecraft on a user-supplied trajectory. The MEO released version 3 of MEM in 2019 [3]. This proceeding describes the orbital populations that form the core of MEM, highlights key differences between MEM 3 and its predecessors, discusses the implications of these changes for spacecraft, summarizes our validation against meteor and in-situ data, and delineates the models limitations

Meteoroid Environment Modeling: the Meteoroid Engineering Model and Shower Forecasting

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Meteoroid Engineering Model (MEM) 3: NASAs Newest Meteoroid Model

No abstract availabl

Modeling Hazardous Meteoroids with NASA's Meteoroid Engineering Model (and Shower Forecasts)

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Performance of D-Parameters in Isolating Meteor Showers from the Sporadic Background

It is often necessary to draw a division between meteor showers and the sporadic meteor complex in order to study these components of the meteoroid environment. Meteor showers persist for less than a season and are composed of members with a greater-than-average degree of orbital similarity. The level of orbital similarity is often quantified using so-called D-parameters; a D-parameter cutoff may be employed to define or extract a shower. Depending on the study, this cutoff value may be chosen based on the size of the data-set, the percentage of sporadic meteors within the data-set, or the inclination of the shower in question. We argue that the cutoff value should also reject the strength of the shower compared to the local sporadic background. We therefore present a method for determining, on a per-shower basis, the D-parameter cutoff that limits the false-positive rate to an acceptable percentage. If the false-positive rate exceeds this percentage regardless of cutoff value, we deem the shower to be undetectable in our data. We apply this method to optical meteor observations from the NASA All-Sky and Southern Ontario Meteor Networks and present the detectable meteor showers and their characteristics

Forbidden Mass Ranges for Shower Meteoroids

Burns et al. (1979) use the parameter beta to describe the ratio of radiation pressure to gravity for a particle in the Solar System. The central potential that these particles experience is effectively reduced by a factor of (1- beta ), which in turn lowers the escape velocity. Burns et al. (1979) derived a simple expression for the value of beta at which particles ejected from a comet follow parabolic orbits and thus leave the Solar System; we expand on this to derive an expression for critical beta values that takes ejection velocity into account, assuming geometric optics. We use our expression to compute the critical value and corresponding mass for cometary ejecta leading, trailing, and following the parent comet's nucleus for 10 major meteor showers. Finally, we numerically solve for critical beta values in the case of non-geometric optics. These values determine the mass regimes within which meteoroids are ejected from the Solar System and therefore cannot contribute to meteor showers