Cameras for All-Sky Meteor Surveillance (CAMS) | |
---|---|
Mission statement | CAMS is an automated video surveillance of the night sky to validate the IAU Working List of Meteor Showers. |
Commercial? | No |
Location | Global |
Founder | Peter Jenniskens |
Established | October 10, 2010 |
Funding | This article incorporates public domain material from websites or documents of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. |
Status | active |
Website | www |
CAMS (the Cameras for All-Sky Meteor Surveillance project) is a NASA-sponsored international project that tracks and triangulates meteors during night-time video surveillance in order to map and monitor meteor showers. Data processing is housed at the Carl Sagan Center of the SETI Institute [1] in California, USA. Goal of CAMS is to validate the International Astronomical Union's Working List [2] of Meteor Showers, discover new meteor showers, and predict future meteor showers.
CAMS [3] networks around the world use an array of low-light video surveillance cameras to collect astrometric tracks and brightness profiles of meteors in the night sky. Triangulation of those tracks results in the meteor's direction and speed, from which the meteors’ orbit in space is calculated and the material's parent body can be identified.
The CAMS software modules, written by Peter S. Gural, have scaled up the video-based triangulation of meteors. The most widely used scripts to run these modules on PCs at the stations were written by Dave Samuels and Steve Rau. Through a series of computational and statistical algorithms, each streak of light in the video is identified and the track is verified as being a meteor or belonging to another light source like planes, or light reflected from moving clouds, birds, and bats.
The first CAMS camera stations were set up in October 2010 at Fremont Peak Observatory and in Mountain View, followed in April 2011 by a station at Lick Observatory, in California. A station in Foresthill was added to the CAMS California network in April 2015. CAMS has since expanded into 15 networks worldwide. Networks of cameras are located in the USA (California, Northern California, Arizona, Texas, Arkansas, Maryland, and Florida), in the BeNeLux (The Netherlands, Belgium and Germany), and in the United Arab Emirates on the northern hemisphere, and in New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, Namibia, Brazil, and Chile on the southern hemisphere.
On February 4, 2011, CAMS detected a brief meteor shower from a still undiscovered long-period comet, thereby proving the existence of that comet. The meteors radiated from the direction of the star Eta Draconis resulting in the new shower called the February Eta Draconids (FEDs) [6] This was just the first of a long list of newly discovered meteor showers. As of Feb 17, 2021, CAMS has helped establish [7] 92 out of 112 single showers [8] and recognized 323 out of 700 meteor showers in the Working List.
In recent years, the effort has shifted from mapping the annual meteor showers to monitoring unusual meteor shower activity.
Meteor Shower Name | IAU Code | IAU Shower number | Year | Features |
---|---|---|---|---|
Arids | 1130 | 2021 | newly detected | |
June theta2 Sagittariids [11] | 1129 | 2021 | newly detected | |
gamma Crucids [12] | GCR | 1047 | 2021 | either newly detected or possible return of 1980 alpha Centaurids? |
29 Piscids [13] | PIS | 1046 | 2020 | newly detected; then stream showed once in October, then again in November |
September upsilon Taurids [14] | SUT | 1045 | 2020 | newly detected shower |
gamma Piscis Austrinids | 1036 | 2020 | newly detected | |
sigma Phoenicids [15] | SPH | 1035 | 2020 | newly detected |
chi Cygnids [16] | CCY | 757 | 2015 | newly detected and returned in 2020 |
Volantids [17] | VOL | 758 | 2015 | newly detected as the New Year's Eve shower. Returned New Year's Eve 2020. |
In 2016, Lowell Observatory CAMS in Arizona captured a -20 magnitude fireball from which 15 meteorites were recovered. [33] The results showed where LL type chondrites originate in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. [34]
In 2012, the Novato meteorite that generated sonic booms was detected by CAMS, [35] and retrieved by local resident Lisa Webber following publication of tracking information. The meteorite was identified as a L6 type chondrite fragmental breccia. [36] [37]
Every night, the combined CAMS networks generate a map of meteor shower activity. Those maps can be accessed the next morning at the CAMS online portal at cams
Building on top of these features, the online portal has been refined and upgraded by SpaceML [39] at meteorshowers
When clicking on one of the points in the websites above, the user is presented with a visualization of the CAMS-detected meteoroid streams in a solar system planetarium setting developed by Ian Webster. The site can be directly accessed at www
The Leonids are a prolific annual meteor shower associated with the comet Tempel–Tuttle, and are also known for their spectacular meteor storms that occur about every 33 years. The Leonids get their name from the location of their radiant in the constellation Leo: the meteors appear to radiate from that point in the sky. Their proper Greek name should be Leontids with an additional ⟨t⟩, but the word was initially constructed as a Greek/Latin hybrid and it has been used since.
A meteoroid is a small rocky or metallic body in outer space. Meteoroids are distinguished as objects significantly smaller than asteroids, ranging in size from grains to objects up to a meter wide. Objects smaller than meteoroids are classified as micrometeoroids or space dust. Many are fragments from comets or asteroids, whereas others are collision impact debris ejected from bodies such as the Moon or Mars.
The Geminids are a prolific meteor shower with 3200 Phaethon being the parent body. Because of this, it would make this shower, along with the Quadrantids, the only major meteor showers not originating from a comet. The meteors from this shower are slow, they can be seen in December and usually peak around December 4–16, with the date of highest intensity being the morning of December 14. Current showers produce up to 120-160 meteors per hour under optimal conditions, peaking around 2:00 or 3:00. Geminids were first observed in 1862, much later than other showers such as the Perseids and Leonids.
A meteor shower is a celestial event in which a number of meteors are observed to radiate, or originate, from one point in the night sky. These meteors are caused by streams of cosmic debris called meteoroids entering Earth's atmosphere at extremely high speeds on parallel trajectories. Most meteors are smaller than a grain of sand, so almost all of them disintegrate and never hit the Earth's surface. Very intense or unusual meteor showers are known as meteor outbursts and meteor storms, which produce at least 1,000 meteors an hour, most notably from the Leonids. The Meteor Data Centre lists over 900 suspected meteor showers of which about 100 are well established. Several organizations point to viewing opportunities on the Internet. NASA maintains a daily map of active meteor showers.
The Perseids are a prolific meteor shower associated with the comet Swift–Tuttle that are usually visible from mid-July to late-August. The meteors are called the Perseids because they appear from the general direction of the constellation Perseus and in more modern times have a radiant bordering on Cassiopeia and Camelopardalis.
The Quadrantids (QUA) are a meteor shower that peaks in early January and whose radiant lies in the constellation Boötes. The zenithal hourly rate (ZHR) of this shower can be as high as that of two other reliably rich meteor showers, the Perseids in August and the Geminids in December, yet Quadrantid meteors are not seen as often as those of the two other showers because the time frame of the peak is exceedingly narrow, sometimes lasting only hours. Moreover, the meteors are quite faint, with mean apparent magnitudes between 3.0 and 6.0.
Biela's Comet or Comet Biela was a periodic Jupiter-family comet first recorded in 1772 by Montaigne and Messier and finally identified as periodic in 1826 by Wilhelm von Biela. It was subsequently observed to split in two and has not been seen since 1852. As a result, it is currently considered to have been destroyed, although remnants have survived for some time as a meteor shower, the Andromedids which may show increased activity in 2023.
The Taurids are an annual meteor shower, associated with the comet Encke. The Taurids are actually two separate showers, with a Southern and a Northern component. The Southern Taurids originated from Comet Encke, while the Northern Taurids originated from the asteroid 2004 TG10, possibly a large fragment of Encke due to its similar orbital parameters. They are named after their radiant point in the constellation Taurus, where they are seen to come from in the sky. Because of their occurrence in late October and early November, they are also called Halloween fireballs. Since 2P/Encke is such a short period comet, the meteors have the slowest impact speed of the annual well-known meteor showers.
The October Draconids, in the past also unofficially known as the Giacobinids, are a Northern hemisphere meteor shower whose parent body is the periodic comet 21P/Giacobini-Zinner. They are named after the constellation Draco, where they seemingly come from. Almost all meteors which fall towards Earth ablate long before reaching its surface. The Draconids are best viewed after sunset in an area with a clear dark sky.
Petrus Matheus Marie (Peter) Jenniskens is a Dutch-American astronomer and a senior research scientist at the Carl Sagan Center of the SETI Institute and at NASA Ames Research Center. He is an expert on meteor showers, and wrote the book Meteor Showers and their Parent Comets, published in 2006 and Atlas of Earth’s Meteor Showers, published in 2023. He is past president of Commission 22 of the International Astronomical Union (2012–2015) and was chair of the Working Group on Meteor Shower Nomenclature (2006–2012) after it was first established. Asteroid 42981 Jenniskens is named in his honor.
The Andromedids meteor shower is associated with Biela's Comet, the showers occurring as Earth passes through old streams left by the comet's tail. The comet was observed to have broken up by 1846; further drift of the pieces by 1852 suggested the moment of breakup was in either 1842 or early 1843, when the comet was near Jupiter. The breakup led to particularly spectacular showers in subsequent cycles.
45P/Honda–Mrkos–Pajdušáková is a short-period comet discovered by Minoru Honda December 3, 1948. It is named after Minoru Honda, Antonín Mrkos, and Ľudmila Pajdušáková. The object revolves around the Sun on an elliptical orbit with a period of 5.25 years. The nucleus is 1.3 kilometers in diameter. On August 19 and 20, 2011, it became the fifteenth comet detected by ground radar telescope.
The Tau Herculids are a meteor shower that when discovered in 1930 appeared to originate from the star Tau Herculis. The parent comet of the Tau Herculids is periodic comet Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 with a 5.4 year orbital period. This meteor shower occurs from May 19 - June 19. The meteor shower was first observed by the Kwasan Observatory in Kyoto, Japan in May 1930. The Tau Herculids' average radiant was α=236°, δ=+41°. Due to orbital perturbations of the meteor streams by Jupiter, 2022 activity will have a radiant of R.A. = 13:56 (209), Decl. = +28. The meteors are relatively slow moving making atmospheric entry at around 16 km/s (36,000 mph).
The Sutter's Mill meteorite is a carbonaceous chondrite which entered the Earth's atmosphere and broke up at about 07:51 Pacific Time on April 22, 2012, with fragments landing in the United States. The name comes from Sutter's Mill, a California Gold Rush site, near which some pieces were recovered. Meteor astronomer Peter Jenniskens assigned Sutter's Mill (SM) numbers to each meteorite, with the documented find location preserving information about where a given meteorite was located in the impacting meteoroid. As of May 2014, 79 fragments had been publicly documented with a find location. The largest (SM53) weighs 205 grams (7.2 oz), and the second largest (SM50) weighs 42 grams (1.5 oz).
Josep Maria Trigo Rodríguez is a Spanish astronomer, astrophysicist and science writer. His work focuses on the early development of the solar system. He is the cofounder of the Spanish Meteor Network.
209P/LINEAR is a periodic comet with an orbital period of 5.1 years. The comet has extremely low activity for its size and is probably in the process of evolving into an extinct comet.
The Novato meteorite is an ordinary chondrite which entered the Earth's atmosphere and broke up over Northern California at 19:44 Pacific Time on 17 October 2012. The falling bolide created a bright fireball and sonic booms and fragmented into smaller pieces as the intense friction of passing through the atmosphere heated it and absorbed its kinetic energy. The meteoroid was about 35 centimeters (14 in) across.
2015 TB145 is a sub-kilometer asteroid, classified as near-Earth object and potentially hazardous asteroid of the Apollo group, approximately 650 meters (2,000 feet) in diameter. It safely passed 1.27 lunar distances from Earth on 31 October 2015 at 17:01 UTC, and passed by Earth again in November 2018.
300P/Catalina is a periodic, near-Earth comet in the Solar System with an orbital period of 4.4 years. It is the second comet ever listed on the Sentry Risk Table. At 1.4 kilometers in diameter, it is one of the largest objects ever listed on the Sentry Risk Table.
C/1939 H1 (Jurlof–Achmarof–Hassel) is a non-periodic comet discovered on 15 April 1939. The comet was discovered by many observers independently but the first reports were those of Olaf Hassel, Achmarof, and Jurlof. The comet had a magnitude of 3 upon discovery.
This article incorporates public domain material from "CAMS". Ames Research Center. NASA.
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