A 13 kg meteoroid from comet 21P/Giacobini-Zinner recorded as a bolide during the 2011 draconid outburst

Abstract

The parent body of the Draconid meteoroid stream is the short period comet 21P/Giacobini-Zinner. This cometary debris gives rise to an annual display of meteors from about October 6 to October 10, with a maximum activity around Octo- ber 8. Although the Draconids is a minor meteor shower, sometimes it has produced brief but spectacu- lar meteor storms. Two of these storms took place dur- ing last century, in 1933 and 1946 [1]. Several researchers predicted the encounter of Earth on October 8, 2011 with different dust trails ejected by comet 21P/Giacobini-Zinner in the late 19th and early 20th century. According to this, an outburst with an activity of several hundred meteors per hour was expected [2, 3]. The SPanish Meteor Network (SPMN) joined the international organised with the aim to study this outburst. Thus, some of the meteor observing stations operated by the SPMN setup addi- tional high-sensitivity CCD video cameras in order to allow for a better coverage of this event. Besides, the Draconid meteoroids are known to be very fragile [2], and accurate data are fundamental in order to reach a better understanding about the physico-chemical prop- erties of these particles. Thus, some of these cameras had attached holographic diffraction gratings (1000 lines/mm) in order to obtain the emission spectrum produced during the ablation of the Draconid meteor- oids in the atmosphere. The moon, with a phase of about 91%, interfered with the observation, but despite this, multi-station meteors as faint as mag. +1/+2 could be recorded together with some fireballs. In this con- text, we present here the anal ysis of an extraordinarily bright Draconid event (mag. -10.5) recorded together with its spectrum during the 2011 Draconid outburst