BRAMS: Belgian RAdio Meteor Stations

BRAMS Newsfeed

METRO annual meeting 2017

The presentations and the minutes of the METRO meeting are finally available here.

Today we start hunting the Alpha Monocerotids in BRAMS data with the help of Radio Meteor Zoo users

Our next Radio Meteor Zoo objective is to observe activity from a "minor" meteor shower called the Alpha Monocerotids. The parent body at the origin of the shower is not known but is assumed to be a long-period comet. The shower was visually observed in 1925, 1935, 1985 and 1995, each time around November 21. Every time, the period of activity was very short (a few tens of minutes to a few hours). In 1995, it produced a spectacular outburst with around 200 meteors observed in half an hour. Some models suggest that Earth will cross a dust trail on November 21, around 21h UT and we will investigate this with our radio observations from the BRAMS network. In 1995, forward scatter radio observations clearly detected the Alpha Monocerotids above the sporadic background. So we are confident that, if there is an outburst, we will be able to detect it. Since the entry speed of these meteors is estimated at 65 km/s, we expect to have a lot of complex meteor echoes, which justifies the use of the Radio Meteor Zoo to detect them. You are cordially invited to help us processing the observations from November 22 9h UT onwards. We look forward to seeing as many Radio Meteor Zoo users as possible to help us hunt the Alpha Monocerotids! For more information, please check this link on the Radio Meteor Zoo forum or this link on the IMO website.

Last week-end two bright fireballs were observed above/nearby Belgium and BRAMS clearly detected them.

The first one was on 17 November at 00:27 UT. Below are spectrograms from BEHOVE and BELIEG. The meteor echo was so bright that it actually smears out most of the other signals in the images. The second one was on 19 November at 02:29 UT. Below are spectrograms from BEHUMA and BEOPHA. The meteor echo is very long and split on two consecutive spectrograms. It was observed with video cameras above Netherlands. See this link for some spectacular images.

A fireball above Belgium detected by BRAMS and by FRIPON optical camera /radio antenna

On 20 October 2017 around 00:37 UT, a fireball passed above Belgium and Netherlands. It was clearly detected by the FRIPON cameras in Brussels and Noordwijk. It was clearly detected by all BRAMS stations as a bright overdense meteor echo. Here are a few examples obtained at BELIEG, BEOPHA, BEUCCL, BEHAAC, BEOTTI and BEHOVE. Note that it was so bright that the noise is barely visible on most spectrograms and that some saturation sometimes occurs. It was also detected by the recently added FRIPON radio antenna listening to the military radar located in Graves, near Dijon, and emitting at approximately 143 MHz. A trail echo is clearly visible for at least 6 seconds. No head echo was detected for this case.

New FRIPON radio antenna in Uccle

On 19 October 2017, we have installed a radio antenna on the roof of the institute in Uccle, as part of the FRIPON-radio project.

Annual BRAMS meeting at MIRA public observatory on 14/10/2017

On 14 October 2017, the people at MIRA Observatory have welcomed us again for the BRAMS annual meeting 2017. The following presentations were given :

Presentations given at the EPSC 2017 and IMC 2017 international conferences

From 17 to 22 September, the European Planetary Science Congress was organized in Riga, Latvia. The following presentation was given:

From 21 to 24 September, the International Meteor Conference 2017 was organized in Petnica, Serbia. The following presentations were given :

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