Earth Matters

Perseids or Sporadic Meteors? Maybe Both

August 17th, 2016 by Kathryn Hansen

On August 13, 2016, we published an image and video showing meteors streaking across the night sky. The perspective is a new one. Instead of looking up from the ground, the camera recorded the action from the vantage point of the International Space Station (ISS). In case you missed it, you can see the image and read the full story here. The video is reposted below.

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At 6 and 16 seconds into the video, bright meteors dash across the sky over Pakistan. The video was acquired a few days before the annual Perseid meteor shower reached its peak. But as one reader pointed out to us via email, only one of these meteors can be associated with the shower. The reason? The view from orbit shows them travelling in different directions.

Meteors within a shower all travel in roughly the same direction and speed. The map below illustrates that point, showing the ground tracks and speed of all Perseids observed in the United States in July and August 2016 by the ground-based all sky camera network. The map shows all Perseids within range of a camera; blank areas are outside the range of a camera.

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“Note how their paths all move from top right to bottom left,” said Bill Cooke with NASA’s Meteoroid Environments Office. “This is what would be seen from the ISS or another space platform.”

Showers look vastly different to a person standing on the ground looking up at a wide view of the night sky. From this perspective, meteors associated with a shower can appear to radiate outward from a central point called the “radiant.” The central point in the night sky is linked to the shower’s name; the Perseids, for example, appear to stem from the area of sky near the constellation Perseus.

The phenomenon, however, is an illusion of perspective. The illusion has been compared to flakes that appear to radiate outward as you drive through a snowstorm, or parallel train tracks that appear to converge in the distance.

“The perspective from orbit is somewhat different, because you are not looking at the entire sky, just a small fraction of the total area,” Cooke said. “In this case, meteors from a particular shower will be all moving the same direction.”

So which meteors viewed from orbit are belong to a particular shower, and which are “sporadic meteors?” That’s the type of information that will ultimately be gleaned from the diffraction grating on the space station’s Meteor camera. It will collect spectroscopy data that can tell scientists about a meteor’s composition, which can ultimately be related back to the parent body—comet Swift-Tuttle, in the case of the Perseids.

One Response to “Perseids or Sporadic Meteors? Maybe Both”

  1. Elena says:

    We were walking in Langley BC last night with some friends before 9pm there was light in the sky and we suddenly saw this big kind of meteor falling from the sky with a big tail it was red and purple direction North West. I have some pictures not sure what it was! There was nothing in the news either