Asymmetries in the natural meteoroid population as sampled by LDEF

By considering the actual orbital geometry of the Long Duration Exposure Facility (LDEF) throughout its 5.8 year operational lifetime, we find that the orientation of the LDEFʹs orbital plane with respect to the ecliptic plane was largely repeatable from year to year at a given solar longitude. Hence the geometry presented to individual interplanetary meteoroid sources could have caused biases in sampling by the LDEF experimental faces. We investigate the effect on the relative flux distributions between LDEF experimental faces due to various meteoroid sources, and find that a strong north to south face asymmetry in measured flux can be obtained as a result of the LDEF sampling of the Taurid meteoroid complex. Experimental data show that there may indeed to a significant north face bias for particles of diameter greater than ∼5 μm.