Luminous efficiency estimates of meteors -I. Uncertainty analysis

The luminous efficiency of meteors is poorly known, but critical for determining the meteoroid mass. We present an uncertainty analysis of the luminous efficiency as determined by the classical ablation equations, and suggest a possible method for determining the luminous efficiency of real meteor events. We find that a two-term exponential fit to simulated lag data is able to reproduce simulated luminous efficiencies reasonably well.