Ablation of small meteor bodies: comparison of solid and porous body models

Abstract

An ablation model is used to describe the interaction of small meteoroids with the Earth’s atmosphere. In this model, the mass loss of a meteoroid is determined using the saturated vapor pressure of the assumed meteoroid substance. The meteoroid is considered in two modifications as a solid and a porous object. An automated method for estimating the parameters of meteoroids (mass, size, and density) from light curves is developed based on the model of small meteor body ablation, which has been used to estimate the parameters of the Perseid meteors with a brightness of -2m to +2m. The effect of the dependence for saturated vapor pressure and the residual on the parameters of the meteoric body is analyzed. It is shown that for the same meteor, the use of different dependences for pressure or different residuals leads to the dispersion of the meteor mass estimate of not more than 10-15% of the average value, and for the meteor size not more than 35-40%. The difference between the maximum and minimum density estimates can be up to five times. The selected dependence for the saturation vapor pressure strongly affects the shape of the light curve, the quality of its approximation, and the density estimate. The average porosity for all meteoroids is 86±5%, which is close to the values for IDP. The density of meteoroids is determined with a large error. The selected model better describes meteoroids with the degree of skewness of the light curve in the range of 0.4 - 0.5. The use of the porous body model has little effect on the mass estimate, while the density estimates increase by up to 2 times.