Meteor Streams and Parent Bodies

Abstract

Problem of meteor orbit determination for a given parent body is discussed. Some of the published methods for obtaining meteoroid's orbital elements at the moment of intersecting Earth's orbit on the basis of geometrical variation of parent body's orbital elements are discussed. The main result concerns the following two facts: i) in real situations physical quantities for the change of orbital elements of the parent body must be used, and, ii) the usage of Southworth and Hawkins (1963) D-criterion yields results not corresponding to observations.