BRAMS Newsfeed
And a new bright fireball observed on 16 June 2018
Another bright fireball was captured by the FRIPON camera in Brussels on 16 June around 21H11 UT (23H11 local time). Based on testimonies collected at the IMO website, the object seemed to move from East to West and could have flown above Belgium. The FRIPON image shows that the object moved to the South-East of Brussels. Again, only a few BRAMS stations were able to observe a faint overdense meteor echo. Below you can see the FRIPON detection with the camera in Uccle and spectrograms from Humain and Tintigny.
Fireball observed on 13 June 2018
A bright fireball was observed by many people in Belgium on 13 June 2018 at 22:50:21 UT, so around 00H50 on 14 June in local time. The object was captured by the FRIPON camera in Brussels. Based on testimonies collected at the IMO website, the object seemed to move from South to North and flew above West Germany. This is consistent with the FRIPON image obtained in Brussels where the object appears low on the horizon to the East (right of the all-sky image). Only a few BRAMS stations were able to observe a faint overdense meteor echo, mostly due to the distance between the object and the transmitter, but also possibly due to the geometry. Below you can see the FRIPON detection with the camera in Uccle and spectrograms from Humain and Overpelt (2 stations located quite to the East of Belgium).
Presentation given at EGU 2018
On Monday April 9, H. Lamy gave a talk on "Study of the Quadrantids 2016 using BRAMS data" during the session "PS2.1/ST1.8 – Small Objects and Dust: Dwarf Planets, Asteroids, Comets, Meteoroids".
METRO annual meeting 2017
The presentations and the minutes of the METRO meeting are finally available here.
Today we start hunting the Alpha Monocerotids in BRAMS data with the help of Radio Meteor Zoo users
Our next Radio Meteor Zoo objective is to observe activity from a "minor" meteor shower called the Alpha Monocerotids. The parent body at the origin of the shower is not known but is assumed to be a long-period comet. The shower was visually observed in 1925, 1935, 1985 and 1995, each time around November 21. Every time, the period of activity was very short (a few tens of minutes to a few hours). In 1995, it produced a spectacular outburst with around 200 meteors observed in half an hour. Some models suggest that Earth will cross a dust trail on November 21, around 21h UT and we will investigate this with our radio observations from the BRAMS network. In 1995, forward scatter radio observations clearly detected the Alpha Monocerotids above the sporadic background. So we are confident that, if there is an outburst, we will be able to detect it. Since the entry speed of these meteors is estimated at 65 km/s, we expect to have a lot of complex meteor echoes, which justifies the use of the Radio Meteor Zoo to detect them. You are cordially invited to help us processing the observations from November 22 9h UT onwards. We look forward to seeing as many Radio Meteor Zoo users as possible to help us hunt the Alpha Monocerotids! For more information, please check this link on the Radio Meteor Zoo forum or this link on the IMO website.
Last week-end two bright fireballs were observed above/nearby Belgium and BRAMS clearly detected them.
The first one was on 17 November at 00:27 UT. Below are spectrograms from BEHOVE and BELIEG. The meteor echo was so bright that it actually smears out most of the other signals in the images. The second one was on 19 November at 02:29 UT. Below are spectrograms from BEHUMA and BEOPHA. The meteor echo is very long and split on two consecutive spectrograms. It was observed with video cameras above Netherlands. See this link for some spectacular images.
A fireball above Belgium detected by BRAMS and by FRIPON optical camera /radio antenna
On 20 October 2017 around 00:37 UT, a fireball passed above Belgium and Netherlands. It was clearly detected by the FRIPON cameras in Brussels and Noordwijk. It was clearly detected by all BRAMS stations as a bright overdense meteor echo. Here are a few examples obtained at BELIEG, BEOPHA, BEUCCL, BEHAAC, BEOTTI and BEHOVE. Note that it was so bright that the noise is barely visible on most spectrograms and that some saturation sometimes occurs. It was also detected by the recently added FRIPON radio antenna listening to the military radar located in Graves, near Dijon, and emitting at approximately 143 MHz. A trail echo is clearly visible for at least 6 seconds. No head echo was detected for this case.