Scientific mission

The main operational goal of the project is to establish a decentralized science-grade instrument which observes the night sky every night of the year from as many locations around the world as possible.

The science goals of the project are the following:

• Providing the meteor community with real-time awareness of the near-Earth meteoroid environment by publishing orbits of all observed meteors from all around the globe every morning.
• Observing meteor showers, computing their flux, mass indices and orbits to constrain meteor shower prediction models.
• Observing meteorite-producing fireballs to increase the number of meteorites with known orbits (only ~50 circa 2021, more info: http://www.meteoriteorbits.info/) and help constrain meteorite source regions.

Watch a video about the scientific goals of the network:

Publications

Vida, D., Erskine, R. C. B., Brown, P. G., Kambulow, J., Campbell-Brown, M., & Mazur, M. J. (2022). Computing optical meteor flux using Global Meteor Network data. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, accepted.

Moorhead, A. V., Clements, T., & Vida, D. (2021). Meteor shower radiant dispersions in Global Meteor Network data. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 508(1), 326-339.

Vida, D., Šegon, D., Gural, P. S., Brown, P. G., McIntyre, M. J., Dijkema, T. J., … & Zubović, D. (2021). The Global Meteor Network–Methodology and first results. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 506(4), 5046-5074.

Moorhead, A. V., Clements, T. D., & Vida, D. (2020). Realistic gravitational focusing of meteoroid streams. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 494(2), 2982-2994.

Kukić, P., Gural, P., Vida, D., Šegon, D. & Merlak, A. (2018) Correction for meteor centroids observed using rolling shutter cameras. WGN, Journal of the International Meteor Organization, 46:5, 154-118.

Vida, D., Mazur, M. J., Šegon, D., Kukić, P., & Merlak, A. (2018). Compressive strength of a skirting Daytime Arietid-first science results from low-cost Raspberry Pi-based meteor stations. WGN, Journal of the International Meteor Organization, 46, 113-118.

Vida, D., Mazur, M. J., Šegon, D., Zubović, D., Kukić, P., Parag, F., & Macan, A. (2018). First results of a Raspberry Pi based meteor camera system. WGN, Journal of the International Meteor Organization, 46, 71-78.

Vida, D., Zubović, D., Šegon, D., Gural, P., & Cupec, R. (2016). Open-source meteor detection software for low-cost single-board computers. In Proceedings of the International Meteor Conference (IMC2016), Egmond, The Netherlands (pp. 2-5).

Zubović, D., Vida, D., Gural, P., & Šegon, D. (2015). Advances in the development of a low-cost video meteor station. In Proceedings of the International Meteor Conference, Mistelbach, Austria (pp. 27-30).