Constellation: Comet Trails: An IMEX application for predicting meteor storms at spac

AerospaceResearch.net is happy to announce the next application running on the Constellation platform, the "IMEX Cometary trails". After successful tests during the last months, you will now help predicting meteor storms at spacecraft or planets by donating idle computing time. Description: The "IMEX Comet trails" project is an ESA-funded project run at the Institute of Space Systems (IRS) at the University of Stuttgart to characterize dust trails produced by comets in the inner solar system. We want to predict meteor showers at any position or time in the solar system: for example, can we predict meteor storms at spacecraft or at other planets?; can we understand how dust produced by comets disperses to form the interplanetary dust cloud? http://i1.ytimg.com/vi/51ht9xC3M8Q/mqdefault.jpg (click here for Youtube-video Motivation: Meteoroid environment modelling is crucial to providing hazard risk assessments for the design phase of spacecraft missions: meteoroid impacts can damage or destroy spacecraft or spacecraft subsystems. Manned space activities are especially vulnerable to any damage caused by meteoroid impacts because of their much lower tolerance level, their large cross sections and their long exposure times. Such models also provide an important scientific role by helping to defining the dust environment and the parent bodies of these grains. Existing dust environment models do not include small-scale and time-dependent structures caused by streams and trails of recently released cometary material. Dr. Rachel Soja (IRS) commented: "I can't wait to see what this plot looks like with all of the data! The Leonid data intended for the first analysis are based on Leonid meteoroid particles on the date of the best Leonid storm in my lifetime - 18 November 1999. If they hit Earth in our model, then our model is ok. We'll know this when we have all the data." http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7348/1...e439341c_n.jpg comet_trails_jupiter by aerospaceresearch.net on Flickr The IMEX contribution: The Interplanetary Meteoroid Environment for eXploration (IMEX) project aims to close this gap, allowing for identification of the important cometary streams at any point in space and time. We extend the application of meteoroid stream modelling at the Earth to ask whether we can determine `meteor showers' that occur at spacecraft locations or at other planets or points of interest. This improves both our understanding of the impact hazard to spacecraft, and our understanding of the formation and dispersion of cometary trails and streams. Integrating dust trajectories with Constellation: We have developed a simple model of emission of dust from comets. We now need to integrate the trajectories of these dust particles as they orbit the sun, in order to explicitly include the effect of planetary gravity (Jupiter is a major perturber). For each comet we have thousands of test particles which must be integrated for 200-400 years. This problem is therefore trivially parallelizable. Our first aim is to model meteor storms and outbursts at the Earth to validate the model for use in predicting the meteoroid environment at other locations in the inner Solar System. First Work-Units: Our first workunits are to compute streams for the Leonids and the October Draconids. These are two meteor showers that we observe each year at the Earth - Leonids in November and Draconids in October. However, in some years, we pass through a trail of very recently released dust and rocks, and we see a 'meteor storm'. The Leonids storms have been the most spectacular displays of meteors ever witnessed, and the storms of 1833 and 1867 helped to fuel scientific and popular interest in meteors, which had previously been considered a mere atmospheric phenomena, rather than evidence of extraterrestrial objects. More recently, Leonid storms were seen also in the years 1998-2002, with up to 3000 Leonids per hour. Understanding these storms through modelling can give us important clues about comets and their dust production, and of the dynamics of cometary dust trails and meteoroid streams. Draconids, named after the constellation Draco (the Dragon), also occasionally demonstrate unusual activity, such as major storms in 1933 and 1946, and, more recently, outbursts in 1998, 2005, 2011, and 2012. Leonid meteors come from a 'Halley-type' comet, 55P/Tempel-Tuttle, which has an orbit that stretches out the the orbit of Uranus, and hurtle into the Earth's atmosphere at 70km/s. However, many meteors, such as Draconids, have rather lower speeds, of perhaps 20km/s – these come largely from 'Jupiter-family comets', which have the outermost part of their orbits near the orbit of Jupiter, and thus can suffer significant perturbations by this planet. These two streams are therefore complementary as test cases for the cometary trails model. Special Event - A Team Space Race - Yuri's Night 2014 - Hunting Comets!: The announcement of the new application is the third and final reason for starting a team challenge! For this year's Yuri's Night, the 12th of April, which is also the birth day of the Constellation platform, we invite you for seven days of number crunching the workunits of Comet Trail and other Constellation apps. You and your team can join via BOINCstats. We also remind you to spend your weekend at one of the many Yuri's Nigh events. You can check their website for a party near you! We will attend Yuri's Night in our home town Stuttgart and we will have a fun day at the planetarium with great events and shows. So just leave your computers running and working for the team challenge, and have a great time outside!

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