Meteoroid impacts on the Moon

Talk by Dr Chrysa Avdellidou, Lecturer in Planetary Science at the School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Leicester.

https://www.youtube.com/live/GU03_bxesFQ

More than 25 years ago the lunar surface started to be monitored with small telescopes for the detection of collisions by recording the produced light. The initial purpose was to understand the flux of impactors on Earth. Since the Earth’s atmosphere is a great interference and the sky monitoring systems for bolides did not have so large detection area, the lunar surface provides an extended area for numerous detections. The estimation of the flux of near Earth Objects (NEOs) is important not only for the prevention of human civilisation (meter-sized, see Chelyabinsk event in 2013) but also for the protection of the space assets (cm-sized objects). Apart from the NEO flux per se, the lunar surface becomes a large-scale impact laboratory, considering both the impactor sizes and speeds compared to the indoor laboratory hypervelocity experiments where the sizes of impactors are typically a few mm and the speeds below 10 km/s. Impact flash data are valuable for several other purposes: Find the coordinates on the lunar surface that the flash occurred and search for the crater afterwards; study the lunar seismic activity caused by meteoroid impacts to understand the lunar interior. In this talk a historical overview will be presented as well as the latest observational advances where the amateur astronomer community will play a key role.

Chrysa Avdellidou is a Lecturer in Planetary Science at the School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Leicester. She was a Fellow at the European Space Agency where she worked on ground-based observations of meteoroid impacts on the Moon and she developed methods to derive the mass and size of small impactors. Then she moved to Nice Observatory where she worked on asteroid science. She has been a collaborator at the NASA OSIRIS-REx space mission to asteroid Bennu. She is ESA Participating Scientist at the Japanese MMX mission to the Martian Moon Phobos. She is member of the Science Team of the ESA cubesat LUMIO which will conduct an observational survey for meteoroid impact flashes on the lunar farside.