Cameras for All-Sky Meteor Surveillance

• Comment: This draft has a disambiguated title.
  If this draft is accepted, an entry will need to be added to the disambiguation page for the primary name.
  The disambiguation page for the primary name is CAMS. Robert McClenon (talk) 23:37, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

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Cameras for All-Sky Surveillance (CAMS)

Cameras for All-Sky Surveillance
The CAMS station at Lick Observatory, in California, setup in April 2011. The CAMS box at the top contains the cameras.
Mission statement	CAMS is an automated video surveillance of the night sky to validate the IAU Working List of Meteor Showers.
Commercial?	No
Location	Global
Founder	Peter Jenniskens
Established	10 October 2010 (2010-10-10)
Funding	This article incorporates public domain material from websites or documents of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
Status	active
Website	www.seti.org/cams

CAMS (the Cameras for All-Sky Surveillance project) is a NASA-sponsored international project that tracks night-time video surveillance to map and monitor meteor showers, and is housed at the Carl Sagan Center of the SETI Institute. in California, USA. CAMS networks around the world use an array of low-light video surveillance cameras to collect astrometric tracks and brightness profiles of meteors in the night sky. Triangulation of those tracks results in the meteor's direction and speed, from which the meteors’ orbit in space is calculated and the material’s parent body can be identified. Its goal is to validate the International Astronomical Union’s Working List of Meteor Showers, discover new meteor showers, and predict future meteor showers.

CAMS has automated video-based triangulation of meteors. Through a series of computational and statistical algorithms, each streak of light in the video is identified and the track is verified as being a meteor or belonging to another light source like planes, or light reflected from moving clouds, birds, and bats. Networks of cameras are located in the USA (California, Arizona, Texas, Arkansas, Maryland, and Florida), the BeNeLux (Netherlands), the United Arab Emirates, Mexico, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, Namibia, and Chile. Each network consists of several different stations from which the meteors are filmed. The first CAMS platforms were set up in October 2010 at Fremont Peak Observatory and Mountain View, followed in April 2011 by a station at Lick Observatory, in California, and have since expanded to 19 locations worldwide. As of Feb 17, 2021, CAMS has helped establish 92 out of 112 single showers and recognized 323 out of 700 meteor showers in the Working List.

CAMS Notable contributions

Using a meteor shower to measure the orbital period of a comet

• In April 2019, CAMS New Zealand station detected a brief outburst of 5 meteors from comet C/1907 G1 (Grigg-Mellish). The timing of the outburst was used to refine the comet orbit. Based on the 1907 observations of the comet orbit alone, valid solutions showed a strong correlation between node and orbital period due to an uncertain distance between comet and observer.

Predicting the existence of a previously unknown comet by detecting its trail of crumbs

• In April 2020, the Phi Serpentid shower (International Astronomical Union Shower number 839), a shower in the Serpens constellation was traced back to the orbit of an unknown long-period comet .
• On February 4, 2011, CAMS picked up meteor shower likely caused by crumbs dropped from an undiscovered comet originating from the direction of the star Eta Draconis resulting in the new shower called the February Eta Draconids (FEDs)

Guiding astronomers in locating the site of freshly fallen meteorites

• 2012 April 22, Impact and Recovery of the Sutter's Mill meteorite: Approximately 79 meteorites were recovered
• 2012, Novato meteorite that generated sonic booms was detected by CAMS, and retrieved by local resident Lisa Webber following publication of tracking information. The meteorite was identified as a L6 type chondrite fragmental breccia.
• In 2016, fragments of a small asteroid above Arizona were captured by a CAMS Lowell Observatory . The recovery of the fragments in the Apache White Mountain reservation showed the meteorite’s origins to be the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
• Locating meteorites at Misfits Flat dry lake, Nevada by Scott Harlan, Peter Jenniskens and others from a CAMS detected fireballs in September 2013-2015. CAMS reports "Initially the local conditions were too harsh to continue search for fallen meteorites. He then diverted to the nearest dry lake bed and found a meteorite within two hours. He went back 19 times and recovered 58 meteorites and meteorite fragments."
• CAMS Arizona captured a 20 magnitude fireball from which 15 meteorites were recovered
• Creston fall in 2015, several L6 ordinary chondrite meteorites recovered

Discovery of new meteor showers

Meteor Shower Name	International Astronomical Union Code	International Astronomical Union Shower number
gamma Crucids	GCR	1047
29 Piscids	PIS	1046
September upsilon Taurids	SUT	1045
chi Phoenicids	CPH	1036
gamma Piscis Austrinids	GPA	1034
sigma Phenicids	SPH	1035
chi Cygnids	CCY	757
Volantids	VOL	758
December alpha Bootids	DAB	497

Monitoring unusual activity meteor showers

• 2020:

1. A significant meteor activity from A-Carinid, an otherwise weak annual shower was detected by CAMS
2. CAMS discovered meteors of chi Phoenicids, a new long-period comet
3. Outburst of Ursids caused by the 1076 A.D. dust of comet 8P/Tuttle
4. CAMS detected delta Mensid shower and identified a minor planet 2006 CS as the probable parent body
5. CAMS detected rho Phoenicids
6. CAMS picked early sightings of chi Cygnids in August, which resulted in speculation that the shower will return, since its last sighting in 2015. The shower indeed returned and was observed in detail in September.

• 2019:

1. CAMS detected an outburst of 15 Bootids, whose orbital elements resemble those of bright comet C/539 W1 Researchers also concluded that this meteor shower was caused by the same bright comet as was described in Histories of the Wars, an 553 A.D. book, and in 2019 the comet appeared to be on its way back.
2. CAMS captured an outburst of June epsilon Ophiuchids, with parent body as periodic Jupiter Family comet 300P/Catalina
3. CAMS detected an outburst of Phoenicids from comet Blanpain
4. The alpha Monocerotid outburst ("the unicorn shower") was observed by the CAMS but its intensity was less than expected. According to Jenniskens "This suggests we crossed the dust trail further from the trail center than anticipated."

• In 2018, CAMS captured an outburst of Draconids and the October Camelopardalids
• 2017:

1. On December 13, CAMS captured 3003 Geminids and 1154 sporadic meteors which shattered all previous records on the number of meteors detected in a single night
2. Earth traveled through the 1-revolution dust trail of a long-period comet C/2015 D4 (Borisov). Jenniskens noted that "Only about once every 25 years is such an intermediate long-period comet discovered that passes close enough to Earth's orbit to have dust trail encounters. This one passed perihelion in 2014." . CAMS South Africa network captured 167 meteors.
3. CAMS captured 12 meteors from an outburst of October Camelopardalids (OCT)

• 2016:

1. gamma Draconids detected by CAMS
2. CAMS picked up Ursids

• 2011

1. CAMS detected eta Eridanids (ERI) from comet C/1852 K1 (Charcornac)
2. CAMS observed the 2011 Draconid meteor shower. First results from 28 Draconid trajectories and orbits show that the meteors originated from the 1900 dust ejecta of comet 21P/Giacobini-Zinner
3. CAMS detected the April Rho Cygnids (ARC), originally discovered by the Canadian Meteor Orbit Radar (CMOR)

• Major fireball activity including:

1. 2019 November 28 Chile fireball
2. 2017 January 3 Belgium fireball
3. 2015 February 28 Sunnyvale
4. 2015 August 27 Greenfield and King City fireball
5. 2015 October 24 bright Sunnyvale fireball
6. 2014 January 10 Tranquillity fireball
7. 2014 March 05 Tranquillity fireball
8. 2014 November two slow-moving fireballs in New Zealand
9. 2014 December 29 Sunnyvale
10. 2013 January 17 Sierra Nevada fireball
11. 2013 February 16 San Francisco Bay Area fireball
12. 2013 October 22 Bay Area fireball

Visualization and data access

The NASA CAMS Meteor Shower Portal built by Frontier Development Lab

The upgraded and refined NASA CAMS Meteor Shower Portal built by SpaceML.

CAMS has an online portal at cams.seti.org/FDL/, (as shown in the left), built by Frontier Development Lab, where data is globally and publicly accessible through daily generated maps of meteor shower activity, offering scientists the opportunity to engage with data. The online portal has been refined and upgraded by SpaceML at meteorshowers.seti.org, (as shown in the right), offering many features such as the ability to zoom into meteor showers, presence of constellations serving as a geographic reference, and a timeline view that allows viewing and exporting specific meteor shower activity for scientific communication. CAMS's data has also been visualized as a meteoroid stream on www.meteorshowers.org/view/iau-4

Featured in the media

• Asteroid 42981 Jenniskens is named after Dr. Peter Jenniskens
• The International Astronomical Union named main belt asteroids after CAMS team members Pete Gural and Jim Albers at the 2014 Asteroids, Comets, Meteors conference.
• The New York Times published a story on CAMS's meteoroid stream visualization tool
• The Japanese broadcasting company NHK filmed the CAMS station at Lick Observatory for a documentary
• Nature News mentioned the impact of CAMS as "Eighty-six previously unknown have now joined the regular spectaculars, which include the Perseids, Leonids and Geminids."
• Frontier Development Lab built an AI pipeline and data visualization dashboard for CAMS.