Expanding the capabilities of meteoroid environment models

Meteoroids pose the largest risk to spacecraft outside of Earth orbit. Assessing and mitigating this risk requires accurate models of hazardous meteoroids. NASA has two such models: the Meteoroid Engineering Model (MEM), which describes the sporadic or background component of the environment, and annual meteor shower forecasts, which predict the increase in flux spacecraft may see due to meteor showers. 

 

This talk describes recent improvements to both models. For instance, MEM has been updated to correctly handle spacecraft locations that lie more than a few degrees in latitude off the ecliptic plane [1]. Correct modeling of the out-of-ecliptic environment is critical for accurately assessing the risk posed by meteoroids to solar observation missions such as Solaris.

 

We have also expanded the capabilities of our shower forecasting algorithm to predict impact rates for arbitrary spacecraft trajectories in near-Earth space. We also perform annual comparisons between our forecasts and observed shower activity to ensure that we are including all potentially hazardous showers [2]. This review allows us to focus our efforts on the most dangerous, rather than the most visually spectacular, meteor showers.

 

References:

[1] Moorhead et al., 2026. Modeling the meteoroid environment far from the ecliptic plane. DOI: 10.3847/PSJ/ae27cb

[2] Moorhead et al., 2025. The threshold at which a meteor shower becomes hazardous to spacecraft. DOI: 10.1016/j.asr.2024.08.012