Summary: The Supersized Science podcast hosted by science writer Jorge Salazar features research and discoveries enabled by advanced computing technology and expertise of the Texas Advanced Computing Center of the University of Texas at Austin. High above your head right now, it's raining dirt. Day or night, every second, millions of pieces of dirt that are smaller than a grain of sand strike Earth's upper atmosphere. At an altitude of about 100 kilometers, bits of dust, mainly debris from asteroid collisions, zing through the sky vaporizing as they go 10 to 100 times the speed of a bullet. The bigger ones can make streaks in the sky, meteors that can take one’s breath away. Scientists are using TACC’s Stampede2 supercomputer, allocated through XSEDE, the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment funded by the National Science Foundation, to help understand how tiny meteors liberate electrons that can be detected by radar and can characterize the speed, direction and rate of meteor deceleration with high precision, allowing its origin to be determined. Because this falling space dust helps seed rain-making clouds, this basic research on meteors will help scientists more fully understand the chemistry of Earth's atmosphere. What's more, meteor composition helps astronomers characterize the space environment of our solar system. The meteor research was published in June 2021 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics of the American Geophysical Society. Study co-author Meers Oppenheim, a professor of Astronomy at Boston University. Dr. Oppenheim, describes his meteor study on Supersized Science.
