Undergraduate students research projects on meteors
Spectracolour
Radiantes UCM is an undergraduate students’ project of the Fireball Research Group. The main goal of the project is introducing young students into modern day investigation and help the group to exploit the large meteor database. Two years ago, the group set up a six camera system in order to record every meteor above Madrid. Since its installation over ten thousand events have been detected.
As part of this program, Radiantes UCM plans to use this data to locate low-activity unknown radiants and confirm new ones. The final aim is to cross-reference this data with information obtained by other SPMN stations. By knowing the apparent trajectory in two different locations we can calculate its real trajectory and its orbit through the Solar System.
First task is to do the plate solving of all the cameras for astrometrically measuring all the meteors detected by the system. The resultant database well be explored looking for new radiants or meteor belonging to recently discovered radiants.
Dungeons and Draconids (& Fellows!)
The GUAIX group (whose acronym stands for Extragalactic Astrophysics and Astronomical Instrumentation Group) conducted an observing campaign of the Draconids 2011 meteor shower, motivated by the predictions of a historic high activity.
The researchers travelled to Sierra Nevada Observatory (OSN), operated by the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia (IAA), to take pictures and videos of the meteor shower from such a privileged point of view. These observations complement the continous monitoring of the Fireball Video-Detection Station at Observatorio UCM. Moreover, a high altitude helium balloon was launched in cooperation with Proyecto Daedalus in order to collect high quality data.
More than 50 GB of data were collected and taken to the dungeons of the Faculty of Physical Sciences of the UCM, where they are being analyzed by some students in a undergraduate collaboration project.