Whats the best wavelength for detecting lunar Leonids?
“So far we’ve seen lunar Leonids as flashes of visible light, but infrared wavelengths around 10 microns would be even better,” says Melosh. The visible flash of a lunar Leonid comes and goes in milliseconds, but bright infrared radiation would persist for minutes, a result of the slow-to-cool crater formed by the explosion. • How big is a lunar Leonid crater? According to computer simulations by Melosh and Nemtchinov, the explosion of a 10 kg Leonid meteoroid would leave behind a 4.5 meter-wide crater on the Moon. • Could a 10 kg Leonid meteoroid make a crater on Earth? No, says Donald Yeomans, manager of NASA’s Near-Earth Object program at JPL. “A 10 kg-sized particle entering the Earth’s atmosphere would cause a fireball event that would be hard to miss. However, it would disintegrate entirely high in the Earth’s atmosphere without getting close to the Earth’s surface. Leonids are traveling at 71 km/s (the fastest meteoroids) and would completely disintegrate even in the very unlike
