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This project investigates how the motion of dust particles can be used to determine key physical properties of planetary and lunar environments using only video footage. Our aim was to develop a low-cost, camera-based method to measure environmental characteristics such as acceleration due to gravity (g) and atmospheric density (ρ).
Video analysis software (Tracker) was used to examine Apollo 16 footage of the Lunar Roving Vehicle during the “Lunar Grand Prix.” The apex of the lofted dust cloud produced on the lunar surface was tracked frame by frame and fitted to ballistic equations to calculate the lunar acceleration due to gravity. We applied the same method to Earth based footage of a Can-Am vehicle on the Utah Salt Flats, and by observing key differences in particle motion due to drag we derived a mathematical model to approximate atmospheric density.
The lunar analysis produced a value of g=1.72 ms^(-2) , within 5.85% of the accepted figure. The Earth model yielded an atmospheric density of ρ=1.31 kg m^(-3), within 6.7% of the reported value.
These results confirm by direct analysis that ballistic dust motion in a vacuum follows ideal parabolic trajectories and that deviations caused by drag can be used to infer atmospheric properties. The findings demonstrate a novel, accurate, and lightweight technique for remotely determining gravitational and atmospheric conditions on other worlds using only optical data.
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