Publications (37)
A Comparison of Fireball Luminous Efficiency Models using Acoustic Records
Luke McFadden, Peter Brown, Denis Vida
The total energy of a fireball is commonly obtained from optical measurements with an assumed value for luminous efficiency. Acoustic energy measurements offer an independent means…
An Upper Limit on the Interstellar Meteoroid Flux at Video Sizes from the Global Meteor Network
Paul Wiegert, Vanessa Tran, Cole Gregg +2
Material arriving at our solar system from the Galaxy may be detected at Earth in the form of meteors ablating in our atmosphere. Here we report on a search for interstellar meteor…
A new method for measuring the meteor mass index: application to the 2018 Draconid meteor shower outburst
Denis Vida, Margaret Campbell-Brown, Peter G. Brown +2
Context. Several authors predicted an outburst of the Draconid meteor shower in 2018, but with an uncertain level of activity. Aims. Optical meteor observations were used to derive…
Century-Scale Effect of Climate Change on Meteorite Falls
Eloy Peña-Asensio, Denis Vida, Ingrid Cnossen +1
Climate change is inducing a global atmospheric contraction above the tropopause (~10 km), leading to systematic decrease in neutral air density. The impact of climate change on sm…
Meteor statistics I: The distribution of instrumental magnitudes
Althea V. Moorhead, Peter G. Brown, Margaret D. Campbell-Brown +2
The distribution of meteor magnitudes is known to follow an exponential distribution, where the base of this distribution is called the population index. The distribution of observ…
CAMO-S: A meteor-tracking spectrograph at the Canadian Automated Meteor Observatory
Michael Mazur, Margaret Campbell-Brown, Peter Brown +3
The Canadian Automated Meteor Observatory (CAMO) mirror tracking system has been in operation since 2009 and has, to date, produced more than 20,000 two-station meteor observations…
In Search of the Potentially Hazardous Asteroids in the Taurid Resonant Swarm
Jasmine Li, Quanzhi Ye, Denis Vida +8
The Taurid Complex is a large interplanetary system that contains comet 2P/Encke, several meteoroid streams, and possibly a number of near-Earth asteroids. The size and nature of t…
Computing optical meteor flux using Global Meteor Network data
Denis Vida, Rhiannon C. Blaauw Erskine, Peter G. Brown +3
Meteor showers and their outbursts are the dominant source of meteoroid impact risk to spacecraft on short time scales. Meteor shower prediction models depend on historical observa…
Telescope-to-Fireball Characterization of Earth Impactor 2022 WJ1
Theodore Kareta, Denis Vida, Marco Micheli +10
Comparing how an asteroid appears in space to its ablation behavior during atmospheric passage and finally to the properties of associated meteorites represents the ultimate probe…
Modelling the 2022 Ï-Herculid outburst
Auriane Egal, Paul A. Wiegert, Peter G. Brown +1
The -Herculids (IAU shower number #61 TAH) is a minor meteor shower associated with comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3, a Jupiter-Family comet that disintegrated into several fra…
Estimating trajectories of meteors: an observational Monte Carlo approach -- I. Theory
Denis Vida, Peter S. Gural, Peter G. Brown +2
It has recently been shown by Egal et al. (2017) that some types of existing meteor in-atmosphere trajectory estimation methods may be less accurate than others, particularly when…
A limit on the mass of the Taurid Resonant Swarm at sub-100 meter sizes
Paul Wiegert, Denis Vida, David L. Clark +3
We report on a pencil-beam survey of the Taurid Swarm, a possible concentration of bodies in the Taurid meteoroid stream associated with the 7:2 mean-motion resonance with Jupiter.…
A Machine Learning Approach to Meteor Classification
Samantha Hemmelgarn, Nicholas Moskovitz, Denis Vida
We use machine learning to develop a framework for classifying meteoroids based on 13 directly observed parameters from the Global Meteor Network. This method adds depth to the $K_…
Preatmospheric detection of a meter-sized Earth impactor
David L. Clark, Paul A. Wiegert, Peter G. Brown +3
On 2020 September 18 US Government sensors detected a bolide with peak bolometric magnitude of -19 over the western Pacific. The impact was also detected by the Geostationary Light…
Quantifying the Bulk Density of Southern Delta Aquariid Meteoroids: Insights from the Canadian Automated Meteor Observatory
Arazi Pinhas, Zbyszek Krzeminski, Denis Vida +1
Physical properties of ten millimeter-sized meteoroids from the Southern Delta Aquariids (SDA) shower are derived using optical observations from the Canadian Automated Meteor Obse…
The Winchcombe Fireball -- that Lucky Survivor
Sarah McMullan, Denis Vida, Hadrien A. R. Devillepoix +34
On February 28, 2021, a fireball dropped kg of recovered CM2 carbonaceous chondrite meteorites in South-West England near the town of Winchcombe. We reconstruct the fireb…
Realistic gravitational focusing of meteoroid streams
Althea V. Moorhead, Tiffany D. Clements, Denis Vida
The number density and flux of a meteoroid stream is enhanced near a massive body due to the phenomenon known as gravitational focusing. The greatest enhancement occurs directly op…
Direct measurement of decimeter-sized rocky material in the Oort cloud
Denis Vida, Peter G. Brown, Hadrien A. R. Devillepoix +10
The Oort cloud is thought to be a reservoir of icy planetesimals and the source of long-period comets (LPCs) implanted from the outer Solar System during the time of giant planet f…
High precision meteor observations with the Canadian Automated Meteor Observatory -- Data reduction pipeline and application to meteoroid mechanical strength measurements
Denis Vida, Peter G. Brown, Margaret Campbell-Brown +3
Context. The mirror tracking system of the Canadian Automated Meteor Observatory (CAMO) can track meteors in real time, providing an effective angular resolution of 1 arc second an…
Precision measurements of radar transverse scattering speeds from meteor phase characteristics
Michael Mazur, Petr Pokorny, Peter Brown +5
We describe an improved technique for using the backscattered phase from meteor radar echo measurements just prior to the specular point () to calculate meteor speeds and th…
Inferring Meteoroid Properties with Dynamic Nested Sampling: A Case Study of Orionid and Capricornid Shower Meteors
Maximilian Vovk, Peter G. Brown, Denis Vida +2
Accurate estimation of meteoroid bulk density is crucial for assessing spacecraft impact hazards from sub-millimeter to millimeter-sized meteoroids. Previous studies often used man…
A Statistical Approach to Quantifying Uncertainty in Meteoroid Physical Properties
Maximilian Vovk, Denis Vida, Peter G. Brown
Meteoroid bulk density is a critical value required for assessing impact risks to spacecraft, informing shielding and mission design. Direct bulk density measurements for sub-milli…
First holistic modelling of meteoroid ablation and fragmentation: A case study of the Orionids recorded by the Canadian Automated Meteor Observatory
Denis Vida, Peter G. Brown, Margaret Campbell-Brown +1
18 mm-sized Orionid meteoroids were captured in 2019 and 2020 by the Canadian Automated Observatory's mirror tracking system. Meteor position measurements were made to an accuracy…
The Global Meteor Network -- Methodology and First Results
Denis Vida, Damir Å egon, Peter S. Gural +10
The Global Meteor Network (GMN) utilizes highly sensitive low-cost CMOS video cameras which run open-source meteor detection software on Raspberry Pi computers. Currently, over 450…
Modeling the past and future activity of the Halleyids meteor showers
Auriane Egal, Paul Wiegert, Peter G. Brown +2
We present a new numerical model of the eta-Aquariid and Orionid meteor showers. The model investigates the origin, variability and age of the eta-Aquariid and Orionid apparitions…
Fireball characteristics derivable from acoustic data
Luke McFadden, Peter Brown, Denis Vida +1
Near field acoustical signals from fireballs (ranges<200 km), when detected by dense ground networks, may be used to estimate the orientation of the trajectory of a fireball (Pujol…
Photometry of Fireballs using High Frame Rate Cameras
Dale Giancono, Hadrien Devillepoix, Robert Howie +2
Fast sampling photometry is essential for characterising fireballs and their fragmentation episodes which link to the meteoroid internal structure. Accurate measurements remain cha…
Estimating trajectories of meteors: an observational Monte Carlo approach -- II. Results
Denis Vida, Peter G. Brown, Margaret Campbell-Brown +2
In the first paper of this series we examined existing methods of optical meteor trajectory estimation and developed a novel method which simultaneously uses both the geometry and…
A reference meteor magnitude for intercomparable fluxes
Althea V. Moorhead, Denis Vida, Peter G. Brown +1
The rate at which meteors pass through Earth's atmosphere has been measured or estimated many times over; existing flux measurements span at least 12 astronomical magnitudes, or ro…
Shock wave formation in the thermosphere by an earthgrazing fireball: Empirical evidence for volatile-enhanced hydrodynamic shielding
Elizabeth A. Silber, Denis Vida, Miro Ronac Giannone +7
Hydrodynamic shielding is a theoretically well-established but observationally elusive and experimentally difficult-to-replicate phenomenon with implications that extend far beyond…
Small Near-Earth Objects in the Taurid Resonant Swarm
Quanzhi Ye, Jasmine Li, Denis Vida +2
The Taurid Resonant Swarm (TRS) within the Taurid Complex hosts dynamically-concentrated debris in a 7:2 mean-motion resonance with Jupiter. Fireball observations have confirmed th…
Meteor shower radiant dispersions in Global Meteor Network data
Althea V. Moorhead, Tiffany Clements, Denis Vida
Meteor showers occur when streams of meteoroids originating from a common source intersect the Earth. There will be small dissimilarities between the direction of motion of differe…
Modeling the measurement accuracy of pre-atmosphere velocities of meteoroids
Denis Vida, Peter G. Brown, Margaret Campbell-Brown
Many existing optical meteor trajectory estimation methods use the approximation that the velocity of the meteor at the beginning of its luminous phase is equivalent to its velocit…
Generating realistic synthetic meteoroid orbits
Denis Vida, Peter G. Brown, Margaret Campbell-Brown
Context. Generating a synthetic dataset of meteoroid orbits is a crucial step in analysing the probabilities of random grouping of meteoroid orbits in automated meteor shower surve…
A Physical Survey of Meteoroid Streams: Comparing Cometary Reservoirs
Nicolas Buccongello, Peter G. Brown, Denis Vida +1
In this work, we present an optical survey of mm-sized meteoroids using the Canadian Automated Meteor Observatory's (CAMO) mirror tracking system. The system tracks meteors to magn…
Dynamical modeling validation of parent bodies associated with newly discovered CMN meteor showers
Damir Šegon, Jérémie Vaubaillon, Peter S. Gural +4
Context: Results from previous searches for new meteor showers in the combined Croatian Meteor Network and SonotaCo meteor databases suggested possible parent bodies for several ne…
Catastrophic disruption of asteroid 2023 CX1 and implications for planetary defense
Auriane Egal, Denis Vida, François Colas +94
Mitigation of the threat from airbursting asteroids requires an understanding of the potential risk they pose for the ground. How asteroids release their kinetic energy in the atmo…