The IAU MDC was established at the General Assembly of the IAU in 1982 to compile orbital data of
meteors. Its establishment was proposed by Bertil A. Lindblad from the Lund Observatory, Sweden
[1].
Lindblad collected a large number of the published orbits of meteors detected by the
photographical technique. In this way, 41 catalogs from several observational stations/networks
were included in the IAU MDC database.
At the beginning of the 1990, the MDC team was enlarged. Vladimir Porubcan, Jan Svoren, and Lubos
Neslusan, all from the Astronomical Institute of the Slovak Academy of Sciences (AsI SAS),
started to collaborate with Bertil Lindblad.
In 2001, at the "Meteoroids conference" in Kiruna, Lindblad officialy handed the Database over
to Porubcan; the MDC moved from the Lund Observatory to the AsI SAS, Slovakia. After this,
the MDC was administrated by Porubcan, Svoren, and Neslusan [2].
In 2007, Tadeusz J. Jopek from the Astronomical Observatory Institute of Adam Mickiewicz
University (AIO AMU) in Poznań, Poland, created a new section of the IAU MDC that deals with
the list of meteor showers, their nomenclature and registration. This took place in cooperation
with the newly formed IAU Working Group on Meteor Shower Nomenclature. Two years later, the first
64 meteor showers were officially named by the IAU during its XXVIIth General Assembly. Until
the end of 2021, there were 112 established meteor showers in the database.
Since 2007, the IAU MDC has consisted of two sections, which deal with (1) the orbits of
individual meteors and (2) the list of showers and their mean characteristics. Each section is
maintained by an autonomous team [3].
The team maintaining the MO part changed during the "Meteoroids 2019" conference. It now
consists of Lubos Neslusan, Jan Svoren, and Marian Jakubik. They are all affiliated to the AsI
SAS in Tatranska Lomnica, Slovakia.
The SD was maintained by Tadeusz J. Jopek, together with Zuzana Kanuchova (AsI SAS, Slovakia)
and Regina Rudawska, for 15 years. Since 2021,
the care of the SD has been taken on by Regina Rudawska (RHEA group/ESA ESTEC,
The Netherland) and Maria Hajdukova (AsI SAS, Bratislava dept., Slovakia).
References:
-
Belkovich et al., 1985, Trans. Int. Astron. Union (Reports on
Astronomy), Vol. 19A, p. 235 – 252
- Lindblad, B. A., 2001, In: Proceedings of the Meteoroids 2001
Conference, 6 - 10 August 2001, Kiruna, Sweden. Ed.: Barbara Warmbein. ESA SP-495, Noordwijk:
ESA Publications Division, ISBN 92-9092-805-0, 2001, p. 71 – 72
- Spurny et al., 2007, Transactions IAU. Proceedings of the
International Astronomical Union, Volume T26B, pp. 140-141