CAOSP abstracts, Volume: 32, No.: 1, year: 2002


Abstract: This paper deals with the solution of well-known single body problem for small meteoroids moving through Earth's atmosphere. The main result is an analytical solution which may significantly accelerate numerical modeling and bring a good view of the specifics of the resulting expressions. A luminous equation takes into account the deceleration process, and extends the basic physical model with the dynamical effect of mass dissipation at the particle surface. Both the particle mass and velocity can then be easily calculated at an arbitrary altitude in isothermal Earth's atmosphere. The analytical expressions offer an unambiguous mapping [v_avg, M, h_max] <--> [v_infinity, m_infinity, delta]. It means the information on observable parameters (average particle velocity in Earth's atmosphere v_avg, the maximum magnitude M and height of maximum luminosity h_max) is a sufficient basis to retrieve an incident velocity v_infinity, mass m_infinity of the particle and its mean effective density delta.

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