UW Sensors, Energy and Automation Lab (SEAL)

Optical Triangulation Platform for the Study of Ionospheric Transient Events

Meteor entries deliver both atmospheric physics and impact hazards, yet existing networks reconstruct trajectories with straight-line fits that discard curvature and fragmentation signatures. This student team developed a three-station optical triangulation platform that reconstructs curved-path trajectories. Each station streams 4K monochrome imagery at 30 fps through a 130° fisheye lens with sub-millisecond GPS timestamps. A software ring buffer preserves 10 seconds of pre-trigger frames before each detected event. At 30 km baselines, the network triangulates 70% of usable sky and resolves 0.3° curvature on bright fireballs, enabling deceleration profiling and fragmentation-induced lateral velocities.