MEO: Software Requests
Meteoroid Engineering Model (MEM)
In an attempt to overcome some of the deficiencies of existing meteoroid models, NASA’s Space Environments and Effects Program sponsored a three year research effort at the University of Western Ontario. The resulting understanding of the sporadic meteoroid environment – particularly the nature and distribution of the sporadic sources – were then incorporated into this new meteoroid environment model (MEM) by members of the Meteoroid Environment Office at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. Some of the revolutionary aspects of MEM are a) identification of the sporadic radiants with real sources of meteoroids, such as comets, b) a physics-based approach which yields accurate fluxes and directionality for interplanetary spacecraft anywhere from .2 AU to 2 AU, and c) velocity distributions obtained from theory and validated against observation. Given a state vector, the model outputs mass-limited or penetrating fluxes and average impact speeds and distributions on the surfaces of a cube-like structure with the ram face oriented along the spacecraft velocity. The current version of MEM, MEM 3, generates environment data for spacecraft orbiting the Earth, Moon, Mercury, Venus, or Mars, or traveling through interplanetary space.
Additional Information:
Language: C/C++
Operating System: Windows 7
Hardware Requirements: 733 MHz Pentium III or faster, 50 Mbytes disk space, >512 Mbytes RAM.
Availability:
- Maintenance/Upgrades: No
- Version history described in user guide
- Source Code: Not Available
- Cost: No
- Distribution: Available through the NASA software catalog
- User guide included with software download
- Training: None
Input Description: Text file containing spacecraft state vectors – time (Julian Day), position (km), velocity (km/s); selection of other options done through GUI interface.
Point of Contact:
Althea Moorhead
Marshall Space Flight Center
Phone: (256) 544-7352