Development of a very faint meteor detection system based on an EMCCD sensor and matched filter processing

Abstract

The mass ranges of meteors, imaged by electro-optical (EO) cameras and backscatter radar receivers, for the most part do not overlap. Typical EO systems detect meteoroid masses down to 10^− 5 kg or roughly magnitude + 2 meteors when using moderate field of view optics, un-intensified optical components, and meteor entry velocities around 45 km/sec. This is near the high end of the mass range of typical meteor radar observations. Having the same mass meteor measured by different sensor wavelength bands would be a benefit in terms of calibrating mass estimations for both EO and radar. To that end, the University of Western Ontario (UWO) has acquired and deployed a very low light imaging system based on an electron-multiplying CCD camera technology. This embeds a very low noise, per pixel intensifier chip in a cooled camera setup with various options for frame rate, region of interest and binning. The EO system of optics and sensor was optimally configured to collect 32 frames per second in a square field of view 14.7 degrees on a side, achieving a single-frame stellar limiting magnitude of m_G = + 10.5. The system typically observes meteors of + 6.5. Given this hardware configuration, we successfully met the challenges associated with the development of robust image processing algorithms, resulting in a new end-to-end processing pipeline now in operation since 2017. A key development in this pipeline has been the first true application of matched filter processing to process the faintest meteors possible in the EMCCD system while also yielding high quality automated metric measurements of meteor focal plane positions. With pairs of EMCCD systems deployed at two sites, triangulation and high accuracy orbits are one of the many products being generated by this system. These measurements will be coupled to observations from the Canadian Meteor Orbit Radar (CMOR) used for meteor plasma characterization and the Canadian Automated Meteor Observatory (CAMO) high resolution mirror tracking system.