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(meteorobs) Arietids-Micrometeorites


Friday June 7, 1996


Gary and everyone,

Thanks to all for responses to my own questions.

Indeed the daylight June Arietids are occurring. June 7, I am in my radio
observatory under headphones and am noting passage through the streams.
There was also noticeable activity June 6 when the radiant was above the
horizon at my site.

What follows here is ponderance and speculation: 
What is interesting to me as I listen today is not only the individual
radio meteor reflections but also the high amount of signal "flutter" that
is intermixed with the individual hits. I wonder if there is a higher
concentration of fine dust with this specific meteor stream?
I know that if I use the word "flutter" some of you may think I am
receiving airplane scatter but I can assure you after many hundreds of
hours of radio meteor observing for baselines that this "flutter"
ionization seems meteor related. At least it is synchronous with passage
through the Arietid stream itself.

I would ask a question then:   What about the important dust qualities of
specific individual showers that are invisible to optical observers and at
the subthreshold of radio observations? 

I hope to connect to other radio meteor observers for correlation of this
possible "flutter" phenomenon. 

This ties in with the micro-meteorite discussion. The microscopic study and
 collection of micrometeorites is something I have considered myself and I
recently consulted a dust expert at Johnson Space Center who is the primary
collector of high altitude space dust for NASA. He sets up the special gel
collectors on their converted U2 spy planes and then studies the plates
with electron scanning microscopes and catalogues the particles. 

He was inconclusive about ground based collection of particles due to the
high abundance of terrestrial particles the mock space dust so closely that
it is difficult to distinguish what is what.  I asked him for papers on the
subject and will look further into the topic to see if there is proof one
way or the other of ground based collecting.

I read the ALPO article on a micrometeorite collecting experiment but what
struck me is why the author would find a higher abundance of shiny magnetic
particles after a meteor shower. This doesn't seem right. 

The micrometeorite subject is intriguing and bears further looking into.
The experiments may need some fine tuning though to pass the requirements
of tight science. 

Tom Ashcraft
Radio Fireball Observatory
35^ 41'  N  105^ 57 '  W
Santa Fe, New Mexico   USA
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