Detecting meteoroids with the Southern Argentina Agile Meteor Radar Orbital System (SAAMER-OS): applications for atmospheric and astronomical research.

Ground-based meteor radars detect the plasma streaks produced when meteoroids ablate in our atmosphere. However they are limited to detecting particles that produce a sufficient amount of plasma within the instrument’s field-of-view, and thus most of the meteoroid’s trajectory remains undetected. Previous work by Dawkins et al. (2023) and Stober et al. (2023) utilised new polarisation measurements made by the Southern Argentina Agile Meteor Radar Orbital System (SAAMER-OS, 53.8^oS, 67.8^oW, Janches et al., 2019), in conjunction with two state-of-the-art models, in order to determine the pre-atmosphere dynamical characteristics (mass, velocity) of the detected particles before they suffered any significant ablation or deceleration. Subsequent work has focused on automating this methodology, to allow us to determine the pre-atmosphere characteristics for all meteoric particles detected by SAAMER-OS. In this work we describe this background methodology and how it can be applied to different facets of atmospheric and astronomical research, including (1) how we can characterise the astronomical sources detected at SAAMER-OS through time (mass and velocities), (2) detections of new meteor showers, (3) to understand the mass distribution function of particles that enter the top of the atmosphere, and (4) variability of atmospheric neutral densities in the Earth’s upper atmosphere.