Roberto Gorelli points our attention at a recently published meteor related paper:

Relationship between Radar Cross Section and Optical Magnitude based on Radar and Optical Simultaneous Observations of Faint Meteors

This article has been submitted for publication by Ryou Ohsawa, Akira Hirota, Kohei Morita, Shinsuke Abe, Daniel Kastinen, Johan Kero, Csilla Szasz, Yasunori Fujiwara, Takuji Nakamura, Koji Nishimura, Shigeyuki Sako, Jun-ichi Watanabe, Tsutomu Aoki, Noriaki Arima, Ko Arimatsu, Mamoru Doi, Makoto Ichiki, Shiro Ikeda, Yoshifusa Ita, Toshihiro Kasuga, Naoto Kobayashi, Mitsuru Kokubo, Masahiro Konishi, Hiroyuki Maehara, Takashi Miyata, Yuki Mori, Mikio Morii, Tomoki Morokuma, Kentaro Motohara, Yoshikazu Nakada, Shin-ichiro Okumura, Yuki Sarugaku, Mikiya Sato, Toshikazu Shigeyama, Takao Soyano, Hidenori Takahashi, Masaomi Tanaka, Ken’ichi Tarusawa, Nozomu Tominaga, Seitaro Urakawa, Fumihiko Usui, Takuya Yamashita, Makoto Yoshikawa.

 

Abstract: Radar and optical simultaneous observations of meteors are important to understand the size distribution of the interplanetary dust. However, faint meteors detected by high power large aperture radar observations, which are typically as faint as 10 mag. in optical, have not been detected until recently in optical observations, mainly due to insufficient sensitivity of the optical observations. In this paper, two radar and optical simultaneous observations were organized. The first observation was carried out in 2009–2010 using Middle and Upper Atmosphere Radar (MU radar) and an image-intensified CCD camera. The second observation was carried out in 2018 using the MU radar and a mosaic CMOS camera, Tomo-e Gozen, mounted on the 1.05-m Kiso Schmidt Telescope. In total, 331 simultaneous meteors were detected. The relationship between radar cross sections and optical V -band magnitudes was well approximated by a linear function. A transformation function from the radar cross section to the V -band magnitude was derived for sporadic meteors. The transformation function was applied to about 150,000 meteors detected by the MU radar in 2009–2015, large part of which are sporadic, and a luminosity function was derived in the magnitude range of −1.5–9.5 mag. The luminosity function was well approximated by a single power-law function with the population index of r = 3.52±0.12. The present observation indicates that the MU radar has capability to detect interplanetary dust of 10^-5–10 ^0 g in mass as meteors.

 

You can download this paper for free:  https://arxiv.org/pdf/2008.08942.pdf (20 pages).

 

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