2019 Mar 04 - Together with a team from the Ernst-Mach Institut Freiburg, the Univ. Oldenburg, and NASA, our Meteor Research Group has surveyed the ram and zenith panels of the Columbus module on the International Space Station, using the video camera on the Canadian robotic arm.
We are working with two students of the TU Munich (Elliot Lee and Max Kellner) to analyze the data. The idea is to determine the number of craters larger than a give size per surface area. From that, we can estimate the number of impacting particles as a function of size. With the exposure time we get the flux density of impacting particles. These can come from either natural micrometeoroids, or from space debris. A planned thesis at the Univ. Oldenburg will run modelling software to find out whether we can determine the relative contributions. We do expect a difference for the zenith- and ram-facing panels. This should help us disentangle the different contributions.
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