- 1Space Exploration Insititute, Neuchatel, Switzerland.
- 2Armagh Observatory, Armagh, UK.
- 3Technical University Berlin, Berlin, Germany.
- 4Technical University of Munich, Ottobrunn, Germany.
MeteorCam - A meteor camera for ESA's LightShip mission
Koschny, D., Christou, A., Bontognali, T, Frühauf, M., Josset, J.-L., Oberst, J., Ruesch, O.
ESA had put out a call for payload for the expected 'LightShip' mission to Mars in 2025. Part of the science to be addressed is to study the meteoroid environment around Mars. MeteorCam has been preliminarily selected as one of the PI-led instruments on this mission. LightShip will be in an orbit about 6000 km away from Mars, monitoring its environment for many years.
MeteorCam is a camera which will detect fireballs and meteors from Mars orbit. It will use a Teledyne e2v CIS-120 detector and fast optics, allowing to detect meteors down to about magnitude +4 on the non-illuminated part of Mars. While the camera will have the complete disk of Mars in its field of view, we expect to detect meteors only on the dark side of the planet. Rejection of straylight from the illuminated portion of the disk is a critical technical challenge.
We expect about 500 detections per Earth year, possibly a factor of 4 more. For each detection, MeteorCam will download the detection time, as well as information about the brightness profile and the position on the planet. This will allow to better constrain the meteoroid flux density environment around and on Mars, important for preparing future missions. From a scientific point, the observations will allow to constrain flux densities of meteoroids in Mars' vicinity and estimate mass and size distributions. The current impact rate on Mars and formation of new craters can be estimated. This will also constrain existing meteoroid models, which were derived from Earth-based observations.
ESA's call described the possibility of having multiple missions. In that case, several cameras could perform stereoscopic observations of meteor tracks. This would allow precise reconstruction of the meteoroid's orbit. An objective grating would allow to constrain the composition of the meteoroid.
How to cite: Koschny, D., Christou, A., Oberst, J., Josset, J.-L., Frühauf, M., Rüsch, O., and Bontognali, T.: MeteorCam - A meteor camera for ESA's LightShip mission, Europlanet Science Congress 2026, The Hague, The Netherlands, 7–11 Sep 2026, EPSC2026-41, https://doi.org/10.5194/epsc2026-41, 2026.
