Monitoring and modeling of the meteoroid environment is vital to the safety and survivability of spacecraft. Engineering design of spacecraft to mitigate hypervelocity impact effects due to the ever…

Monitoring and modeling of the meteoroid environment is vital to the safety and survivability of spacecraft. Engineering design of spacecraft to mitigate hypervelocity impact effects due to the ever present background meteoroid populat on requires knowledge of the true flux of meteoroids as a function of mass, their speed distributions, their density distributions and their directionality. The timevariable component of the meteoroid population (meteor showers) necessitates near real-time monitoring of the meteoroid environment. Recent improvements in ground based radar, electro-optical imagers and automated computer hardware and software provide the capabilities for a robust meteoroid environment monitoring and data collection system to address both of these needs. The university of western ontario ("western university") measures meteoroids and their interaction with the upper atmosphere using multiple technologies across a broad range of masses. Western university has unique long-term and near real-time measurement capabilities, modeling and analysis techniques that specifically address aspects of the meteoroid environment that pertain to spacecraft threat. Western university proposes to collaborate with NASA's meteoroid environment office ("MEO") to utilize the skills and technology that allow both parties to better characterize and monitor the natural meteoroid environment near earth and the inner solar system. Western university has had a productive working relationship with NASA for the past 15 years; developing new technology to collect information on video observed meteors, interpreting meteor radar data that characterizes background sources of meteoroids and better defines meteor showers for spacecraft forecasts. Western university's dynamical modeling of the physical evolution of the two basic types of meteors, namely "showers" (or streams) and "sporadics" (or background meteoroids) have also contributed to the success and acceptance of NASA's meteoroid environment tool, the meteoroid engineering model ("MEM"). Western university has previously developed a new sporadic meteoroid model that has been calibrated with the radar results and validated with optical data that will be integrated into the next generation NASA meteoroid engineering model where the underlying physical modeling will be extended and improved through a joint program between the MEO and western university. The proposed project will involve the collection of data on the meteoroid environment through the use of the canadian meteor orbit radar (cmor), a two-station proto-type automated electrooptical camera system - the canadian automated meteor observatory (camo) - infrasound arrays, simultaneous electro-optical i large aperture radar measurements and all-sky camera systems. The collected data will be interpreted with advanced dynamical modeling both at western university and at the MEO at marshall space flight centre ("msfc") in order to generate new and improved estimates of the physical properties of meteoroids and enhance meteor stream forecasts that alert spacecraft operators of increased risk in near real-time. Data gathered from optical camera systems will be jointly shared and reduced i analyzed to characterize individual meteor showers and meteoroid properties such as bulk density. Western university and msfc have collaboratively established a large video network of fireball cameras for situational awareness of major fireballs and expansion of this network as well as improved software for fast analysis of data is a core element of this project.western university's infrasound array and western university analysis of ctbto global infrasound data in near real-time will be used to augment situational awareness of this larger impacts and to study acoustic effects of large exploding meteors. The chelyabinsk airburst of FEB 15, 2013 motivates this aspect of the collaborative study to better understand ground effects/hazard from these larg