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Deconvoluting measurement uncertainty from the meteor speed distribution
Author(s) -
Moorhead Althea V.
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
meteoritics and planetary science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.09
H-Index - 100
eISSN - 1945-5100
pISSN - 1086-9379
DOI - 10.1111/maps.13066
Subject(s) - meteoroid , meteor (satellite) , sharpening , distribution (mathematics) , physics , astronomy , geology , geodesy , meteorology , mathematics , computer science , computer vision , mathematical analysis
Debiasing the velocity distribution of meteors observed by the Canadian Meteor Orbit Radar ( CMOR ) yields a distribution with large numbers of slow meteors. The distribution also contains significant numbers of hyperbolic meteors, in conflict with the expectation that interstellar meteors should be rare. In Moorhead et al. (2017a), we noted that measurement uncertainties were possibly smoothing the speed distribution and redistributing meteors to the extreme ends of the speed distribution. In this report, we use techniques analogous to image sharpening to remove the blurring caused by measurement uncertainties. The deconvolved speed distribution appears to have no meteors slower than 14 km s −1 and none faster than 74 km s −1 . The result is to substantially raise the characteristic velocity of incoming meteoroids from 12.9 to 20.0 km s −1 .