Radar Detectability Studies of Slow and Small Zodiacal Dust Cloud Particles. III. The Role of Sodium and the Head Echo Size on the Probability of Detection

Abstract: We present a path forward on a long-standing issue concerning the flux of small and slow meteoroids, which are believed to be the dominant portion of the incoming meteoric mass flux into the Earth’s atmosphere. Such a flux, which is predicted by dynamical dust models of the Zodiacal Cloud, is not evident in ground-based radar observations. For decades this was attributed to the fact that the radars used for meteor observations lack the sensitivity to detect this population, due to the small a…