The radiant distribution of AMOR radar meteors

A large data set provided by the highly sensitive Advanced Meteor Orbit Radar (AMOR) facility is used to investigate the structure of the sporadic meteor complex. The helion, antihelion and apex apparent sources are clearly found. Observational bias is then removed to reveal the true source distributions as observed on Earth. A long-standing problem in meteor science has been the difference in observed meteor flux between the helion and antihelion source directions. Consideration of the effects of atmospheric interference and Faraday rotation is found to lead to a closer balance between these. The orbital distributions present within the different regions are also discussed. The apex region is found to have a strong retrograde component and a weaker prograde component that exists at high southerly latitudes and that contains orbits with particularly high inclinations. The retrograde component reduces substantially after inclusion of observational bias corrections. Care should be taken in comparing the results presented here with those from other radar systems: AMOR is sensitive to dust as small in diameter as similar to 40 mu m, while the limiting sensitivity of most contemporary systems is an order of magnitude larger.