Are you curious about where shooting stars come from, whether the next big impact can be predicted, or what makes a comet? My group gives students hands-on access to instruments that exist almost nowhere else — and the data to answer real, open questions. We apply those answers to improve meteoroid models for satellite protection as well as entry models for planetary defence used to predict ground-damage from decameter-scale and larger impactors.
Why do graduate work here?
- You will use world-class facilities: the CMOR radar, the CAMO mirror-tracking observatory, EMCCD camera networks, infrasound arrays, the Global Meteor Network, and Project Luciole.
- You will join one of the largest and most productive meteor-physics groups in the world, within Western’s Department of Physics & Astronomy and its Institute for Earth and Space Exploration.
- Your work can matter beyond academia — our results are used by NASA, ESA, DND and the planetary-defence community.
- Projects span observation, instrumentation, signal processing and numerical modelling, so there is a fit whether you love hardware, data or theory.
Open projects
Here are representative projects currently available to graduate and senior undergraduate students. Each can be scaled to an MSc or PhD; the tags show the main skills involved (most are learnable on the job).
Physical analysis & orbital correlations among faint meteors
Carry out the first detailed reconnaissance of a brand-new database of the faintest meteors ever recorded by our EMCCD cameras, correlating meteoroid strength and ablation with orbit type.
Space-based detection of meteor-shower fireballs
Mine NASA’s GOES Lightning Mapper bolide catalogue to measure the population of the largest meteoroids in major showers — an upper limit on how big shower particles get.
Oceanic detection of meteorite impacts
Search global hydroacoustic records for the signatures of large bolides and meteorites striking the ocean, and pin down how efficiently impacts couple into the sea.
High-precision radar measurement of meteoroid speeds
Apply the Fresnel-transform technique to CMOR data and benchmark it against other methods using well-known meteor showers.
Shock waves from optically detected shower meteors
Correlate infrasound from the IS26 array in Germany with bright shower meteors caught by the Czech camera network to measure the energy that goes into meteor shock waves.
Weighing meteoroids with multi-station radar
Measure the deceleration and ionization of small meteoroids seen simultaneously from up to six CMOR stations, and combine them with entry models to estimate bulk densities.
Multi-technique modelling of meteoroid ablation
Constrain the structure of millimetre-sized meteoroids by modelling simultaneous radar and high-resolution optical observations of the same meteor.
Wavelet detection of asteroidal meteor showers
Apply wavelet methods to 20 million CMOR orbits to isolate new low-speed showers that may trace recent mass-loss from near-Earth asteroids.
Origins of metre-sized Earth impactors
Use the JPL/CNEOS fireball database of US-Government sensor detections to work out the orbits, sizes and strengths of metre-sized objects breaking up over the Earth.
Recent student-led results
Work led by my students has appeared in the leading journals of the field. A few recent examples:
- Discovering a large population of slow iron meteoroids from an EMCCD orbit survey.
- A new algorithm to measure meteoroid speeds from megawatt-class radar.
- Direct measurements of meteoroid compressive strengths from CAMO fragmentation.
- Dating the Arietid stream and untangling the Taurid complex with dynamical models.
- Reconstructing the atmospheric disruption of the predicted impactor 2023 CX1 (Nature Astronomy, 2025).
- Setting orbital limits on metre- and decametre-sized Earth impactors.
How to apply
Email me at pbrown@uwo.ca with your CV, a short note on what interests you, and your background. Graduate students apply through Western’s Department of Physics & Astronomy. I particularly encourage students from groups traditionally under-represented in physics to get in touch.
See also the group’s projects and jobs page.