Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

The most primitive and unaltered objects in our solar system are asteroids, comets, Kuiper-Belt objects and their intermediate collisional products, namely meteoroids. These are the left-over building blocks from the formation of the solar system. Their origin, interrelationships and ongoing evolution provide a unique window into the major processes which led to the solar system we see today and help constrain models of planetary system formation and evolution. These small solar system bodies also interact with the Earth and form an impact hazard to satellites at small sizes and to the Earth's biosphere at larger sizes. My research program seeks to understand this left-over debris from the formation of the solar system. I accomplish this by observing dust particles which would otherwise be too small to observe directly in space by recording their interaction with the Earth's atmosphere, which acts as a detector. Some of these particles have origins in our solar system - by observing their characteristics as they burn up in the atmosphere we can infer where they were produced, what they are made of and through linkages with their parent populations (asteroids and comets) understand how small solar system bodies fit into the bigger picture of how the solar system has formed and evolved. There is growing evidence that a fraction of these small particles originate from other stellar systems - making them messengers from distant planetary systems which formed in different ways than our own. A key goal of my program is to detect these interstellar meteoroids and link them back to their home star systems, providing even broader insight as to how planetary system formation proceeds. Another key outcome of my program is to better define the dust environment near the Earth and use this to build better "space weather" models. These meteoroid models will be used to both safeguard satellites during unusually heavy space weather (intense meteor showers) as well as provide the engineering baseline needed to design satellites to better withstand the battering from the general background of meteoroid impacts. This will help protect satellites which society is increasingly reliant on for critical infrastructure such as cell phone usage and weather forecasting. Finally, my program will lead to a better understanding of the number of small (~meter to decameter-sized) near Earth objects as well as their physical characteristics. This will help inform models of planetary defence which seek to simulate the effects of such impacts at the ground. In the event a small asteroid of the size which exploded over Chelyabinsk Russia in 2013 is found in advance, this information will be crucial in deciding how damaging a small impactor would be and what civil defence measures should be taken to protect lives and infrastructure.