Long-duration artificial meteors created during the CZ-3B R/B re-entry observed by AMOS

Long-duration artificial meteors created during the CZ-3B R/B re-entry observed by AMOS
Daniela Bartková, Jiří Šilha, Juraj Tóth, Leonard Kornoš
Space debris objects, such as upper stages left after rocket missions, orbit the Earth in an environment that affects their dynamic properties. The perigee gradually decreases and after reaching critical altitude, re-entry begins. A re-entering object does a few more revolutions during which it can break up into smaller fragments and start to ablate, creating artificial meteors. These meteors enter the denser atmosphere at shallow angles and speeds typical for objects on low-Earth orbits (up to 10 km/s according to altitude and mass), thus they are rather slow and long-lasting with ballistic trajectories, unlike most natural meteors. Nevertheless, analysis of a re-entry event makes use of the knowledge and methods from meteor astronomy. Studying re-entry events is key to understanding the physics behind their mechanism and properly estimating the damage such events can cause to the human population, property, and the environment. Two AMOS all-sky cameras simultaneously observed the re-entry of CZ-3B R/B (upper stage of Chinese Long March 3B rocket) over the Hawaiian Islands on October 25th, 2020. The re-entry produced tens of fragments forming a cluster, from which seventeen could be manually identified on both recordings and measured to reconstruct their trajectories using triangulation for each measured position. The focus was on possible approaches to properly extract dynamics from the obtained trajectories, especially the velocity needed for dynamic modeling to estimate the mass of individual fragments. In the talk, obtained trajectories and dynamic properties will be presented and discussed.
IMC 2023
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