TITLE:
Video meteor observations and spurious meteoroid orbits

AUTHOR:
M. Hajdukova, AI SAS, Tatranska Lomnica

ABSTRACT:
Rapidly-developed video techniques which produce a massive 
number of meteoroid orbits have become extremely important 
for good statistical evidence on the nature of the meteoroid 
population. The use of orbits on an individual basis, however, 
requires high accuracy data. Lacking them, the resulting analyses 
may be seriously biased. 

Discriminating between orbits of different natures for individual 
meteoroids is demanding, even for the most accurate photographic 
meteors. Analysis of several video datasets showed that, for fainter 
meteors obtained by video techniques, this discrimination is, almost 
critical for some kinds of orbits. It is possible to demonstrate 
how strong the influence of measurement errors on the resulting 
orbit can be. Especially if you concentrate on orbits which are 
exceptionally rare and can easily be caused by measurement errors. 
Spurious orbits affected by errors may result in a wrong identification 
of new meteor showers or create artificial populations of meteoroids; 
in addition, they also influence models.