ORISON, stratospheric instrumentation project with potential applications in meteoroid science

ORISON is an H2020 European-funded project created to carry out a feasibility and design study of an astronomically-oriented balloon facility that could deploy one or several small-to-medium-sized stabilized telescopes and a suite of other scientific instruments as light payloads to do state of the art research at acceptable costs.

Advantages of stratospheric observations of meteors:

•Closer to the source

•No clouds blocking the view

•More atmospheric volume available due to transparency of the stratosphere -> larger statistics.

•Interplanetary dust collecting

•Less Rayleigh/Mie scattering (Moon/Sun/light pollution)

•Daytime observation.

•Inside or underneath the event

•Flexibility (new tech)

•Cheaper (100 k€ vs 1 M€)

•Low sky brightness

•UV, Visible, IR and Radio transparent

Other advantages:

•Low cost of development (vs NASA and JAXA probes)

•Fast development

•Synergies with other scientific cases

•More flexibility on location

•Missions from 2 h to 100+ days