This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
This project will significantly expand our knowledge of the dust environment of our solar system by tracking the speeds and directions of incoming meteors, thereby allowing their orbits to be reconstructed. This will be enabled by an upgrade to the Southern Argentinean Agile Meteor Radar now operating in Rio Grande, Tierra del Fuego, Argentina. The modifications will allow the system, already ten times more powerful than traditional meteor radars, to operate continuously, to detect particle masses as small as one microgram, and more accurately to determine meteoroid orbital parameters for millions of extraterrestrial particles. The four year scientific research project focuses on high resolution studies of the interplanetary and interstellar dust environment. The new capabilities, combined with new software for determining orbital parameters and a more detailed method of mass determination, will provide data that will greatly advance the scientific state of the art in characterizing interplanetary dust. Of particular significance is the improved low-mass detection limit, which has the potential to probe the origin of interstellar grains. The detection of these grains, for example the confirmation of the beta Pictoris dust stream, would have important implications for our understanding of the material between stars.
The research to be carried out is an international collaboration between Argentina, Canada, and the US. The radar is maintained by personnel from the Estacion Astronomica Rio Grande (EARG) and the Department of Astronomy and Geosciences of the National University of La Plata (UNLP), who will participate as full research collaborators. The work also involves collaboration with the University of Western Ontario in Canada and the University of Colorado, adding a strong educational component. Graduate students from the US and Mexico will be trained in meteor orbital science, interplanetary dust environment and data analysis and interpretation.
