Meteor Astronomy
Nepal's first eyes on the meteor sky
Every night, meteoroids strike the upper atmosphere and burn up as meteors, leaving brief trails of light and ionisation. A network of cameras that sees the same meteor from two stations can triangulate its path, recover its orbit, and measure the flux of material the Earth sweeps up. The Global Meteor Network (GMN) does exactly this with 450+ stations in 80+ countries — and Nepal is entirely absent.
A new geographic position means new shower radiant visibility, new flux statistics, and orbits no existing station can recover. The GMN operates 450+ stations in 80+ countries; any deployment in this gap is valuable immediately. globalmeteornetwork.org
Blue: approximate GMN coverage regions. Red: the South Asian gap. Amber: HICS's planned station.
Cameras, orbits, and a contribution to the network
A GMN-compatible all-sky camera (Sony IMX291 fisheye sensor running the open RMS software) records the night sky and automatically detects meteors. Paired with stations across the valley, it triangulates fireball trajectories, recovers meteoroid orbits, measures shower radiants and population statistics, and feeds everything back to the global network. See the all-sky meteor camera in the instruments section.
The principal investigator's peer-reviewed work — Dhakal et al. (2023), New Constraints on Macroscopic Dark Matter Using Radar Meteor Detectors, Physical Review D 107, 043026 — shows that radar meteor systems detecting ionisation trails can also constrain macroscopic dark matter, which leaves identical signatures. A meteor station in Nepal contributes to both meteor astronomy and dark-matter searches from a new vantage point. doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.107.043026
Planned. No camera is deployed yet — this page describes the gap and the plan. The first station establishes Nepal's presence in the Global Meteor Network.
