PRELIMINARY ANALYSIS OF A SIMULATED METEOR REENTRY AT 9.8 KILOMETERS PER SECOND

摘要

A brief description is made of the Trailblazer Ig artificial meteor experi¬ment at a reentry velocity of 9.8 kilometers per second. The methods of obtaining data during the visible reentry and the corrections to the photo¬graphic data necessary for the final analysis are developed. A value of the luminous efficiency, or the percent of kinetic energy converted into visible light, is computed from the observed photographic data and is compared with that obtained by a classical meteor theory. The observed luminous efficiency of 9-55 X 10-4 is about 80 percent of the luminous efficiency of 1.17 × 10-3 com¬puted from Üpik's 1958 classical meteor theory at an average velocity of 9.41kilometers per second. The luminous efficiency for the artificial iron meteoroid is extrapolated to natural stony meteors of 15 percent iron at the same velocity, and it is found that the lower limit of the luminous efficiency of a stony meteor is 1.44 × 10-4.