Modelling a short-wake meteor as a single or fragmenting body

An attempt is made to model a meteor observed with the Canadian Automated Meteor Observatory tracking system using a single body model. This meteor showed only very faint wake, implying that fragmentation was not important. Previous attempts to model the meteor with models of fragmenting meteors had overpredicted the amount of wake seen. A single-body, non-homogeneous ablation code was developed, but proved unsuccessful at matching the observed light curve of the meteor, even after a thorough search of parameter space. A model of a meteoroid fragmenting in many small bursts of small fragments was developed in an attempt to match both the light curve and the observed wake, and it succeeded in producing a qualitative fit to the light curve and to the high-resolution wake.