BRAMS Newsfeed
Promotional movie about meteors and BRAMS
In cooperation with the company NTTRB (Never Touch The Red Button) and with the support of our
communication cell, we have produced a short movie that explains the difference between meteoroids,
meteors and meteorites, radio observations of meteors, BRAMS, and what you see in a spectrogram.
The movie is made for the large public and lasts 3 minutes and 20 seconds. It will be used on our social
media, websites, etc, but is also entitled to be shown to the public next to a live data display. This could be of
interest for public observatories (e.g. Planetarium, MIRA, Cosmodrome, Astropolis, Euro Space Center, etc) and possibly also
in universities or schools. If you are interested, the movies can be downloaded here
There is an English version only (no subtitle) and 3 versions in English with FR, NL and EN subtitles.
You can see them also on the BIRA-IASB Youtube channel :
Auroras visible in BRAMS data
Many of you were able to see the incredible auroral display we had in Belgium during the night from 10 to 11 May.
Despite less exciting than beautiful images or movies that were subsenquently available online, auroras were also clearly visible in the BRAMS data!
The presence of aurora triggered an increase of the electromagnetic noise level near our frequency at 49.97 MHz. This happened several times during that night, corresponding to periods of amazing auroral display. This was visible at all BRAMS stations. Below are examples of noise measurements obtained at our stations in Oudsbergen, Overpelt or Halle-Zoersel. The blue and red curves show a measure of the noise in a 100 Hz wide bandwidth centered on respectively 800 and 1200 Hz (for the stations using digital receivers which are stabilized in frequency and for which our frequency appears at 1000 Hz after down-shifting the frequencies).
To give you an idea about the perturbations induced by the aurora, below are two spectrograms from BEOUDS obtained on 11 may at 00:45 UT (just before the start of an aurora), and at 01:20 UT (during one maximum of activity). As you can see, not much is visible anymore, even the direct signal becomes barely visible at 01:20 UT.
What is also very interesting in the plots above is that we see on Saturday afternoon that there was again a strong increase of noise (although much smaller than the night before) visible at all 3 stations and whose origin is most likely again due to auroras. Those auroras were obviously not visible during the day.
Open doors in Humain
During the week-end of 9-10 September 2023, the radio astronomical site of Humain opened its doors for the very first time to the public. This event was organized by the Royal Observatory of Belgium but with a strong contribution of BIRA-IASB to present our activities there. In particular we made the traditional live demonstration of meteor radio forward scatter and also explained to the public how our BRAMS interferometer works and why it is important for us. We also show the various type of cameras (GMN, All-Sky7, EN) installed in Humain and which contribute to several important networks of optical cameras.
You can also see a nice broadcast about the Humain website and its history with this link.
Radio Meteor Workshop at Euro Space Center
On August 30, we had the pleasure to organize a radio meteor workshop at the Euro Space Center. There were 21 participants on site and 12 participants online.
The presentations and video of the talks will become soon available on a separate page.
IMC 2023
From 31 August until 3rd September, we had the pleasure to organize the IMC 2023 at the Euro Space Center in Redu.
All the videos and documents of the talks are available on the Program Page.
Below you can also find some nice pictures of the event including during our excursion to the radio astronomical site of Humain and to Les Grottes de Han (Copyright : Peter Slansky and Coralie Byttebier)
New BRAMS station at Hagnicourt
We have installed a new station in Hagnicourt, France, South of Charleville-Mézières. The station is installed near an astronomical site which also hosts 4 GMN cameras.
A cure of youth for the reflecting grid of the BRAMS transmitter
Over the last few months, rust was propagating fast in the 8m x 8m reflecting grid of the BRAMS transmitter. It was necessary to replace it to ensure a good electrical conductivity. This was done recently by people from our workshop with an excellent result. See pictures before and after below
