Submillisecond fireball timing using de Bruijn timecodes

Abstract

Abstract Long‐exposure fireball photographs have been used to systematically record meteoroid trajectories, calculate heliocentric orbits, and determine meteorite fall positions since the mid‐20th century. Periodic shuttering is used to determine meteoroid velocity, but up until this point, a separate method of precisely determining the arrival time of a meteoroid was required. We show it is possible to encode precise arrival times directly into the meteor image by driving the periodic shutter according to a particular pattern—a de Bruijn sequence—and eliminate the need for a separate subsystem to record absolute fireball timing. The Desert Fireball Network has implemented this approach using a microcontroller driven electro‐optic shutter synchronized with GNSS UTC time to create small, simple, and cost‐effective high‐precision fireball observatories with submillisecond timing accuracy.