Extraterrestrial meteors: a martian meteor and its parent comet.
Regular meteor showers occur when a planet approaches the orbit of a periodic comet--for example, the Leonid shower is evident around 17 November every year as Earth skims past the dusty trail of comet Tempel-Tuttle. Such showers are expected to occur on Mars as well, and on 7 March last year, the panoramic camera of Spirit, the Mars Exploration Rover, revealed a curious streak across the martian sky. Here we show that the timing and orientation of this streak, and the shape of its light curve, are consistent with the existence of a regular meteor shower associated with the comet Wiseman-Skiff, which could be characterized as martian Cepheids.
Selsis
Franck
F
Centre de Recherche Astronomique de Lyon, Ecole Normale Supérieure, 69364 Lyon, France. franck.selsis@ens-lyon.fr
Lemmon
Mark T
MT
Vaubaillon
Jérémie
J
Bell
James F
JF