Evaluation of Artificial Meteor Sources with Arc Heater Wind Tunnel

Abstract

This paper proposes a mission for observation of the upper atmosphere using an artificial meteor released by a mass driver installed on a microsatellite. The mass driver releases the sample, which comprises definite materials and deorbits to become an artificial meteor, where its emission provides valuable information concerning the upper atmosphere that can be obtained through spectroscopic analysis. We discuss the present achievements in the research and development of the artificial-meteor sample. We conducted a variety of calculations of the flow-field simulation and spectroscopic estimation, the results of which agree closely with those in the case of practical meteors. Additionally, we performed an experiment on the artificial-meteor sample using an arc-heated wind tunnel at the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (ISAS/JAXA). We applied several kinds of materials as test samples and measured their emissions with a spectrometer; we also validated the results of the experiment and simulation. We confirmed that the emissions would be observed as a meteor with the naked eye from the ground.