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P. A. Wiegert, P. G. Brown (Univ. of Western Ontario)
Most major meteor showers have identified parent bodies, comets or asteroids from which the meteoric material was released. The sources of minor meteor showers, however, are still not known with certainty. Of particular interest is whether these weak showers originate from faint comets, extinct comets or asteroids. There are two difficulties involved in linking weak showers with their parent bodies. First, the catalog of near-Earth objects has remained until recently quite incomplete. Second, the orbits of minor meteor showers have large uncertainties, owing to the small number of measured orbits for each one. Both of these problems have been alleviated over the last decade. Near-Earth asteroid searches like SpaceWatch, LINEAR and LONEOS have made great strides in completing the inventory of small objects near the Earth. Meteor patrol radars like the Canadian Meteor Orbital Radar located near London, Ontario, Canada, and which has collected over 1 million meteor orbits, have greatly increased the quality of data available for weak showers. These two new data sets are highly complimentary and will allow the links between minor meteor showers and their parents to be established with greater confidence.
The authors thank the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada for funding. PGB also gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Research Chairs program.
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Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 36 #4
© 2004. The American Astronomical Soceity.