UV video spectroscopy of Leonid fireballs and persistent trains

Cometary meteoroids are considered as one of the best candidates to have supplied organic compounds to the Earth in the early stage of its history. However, there had been no observational evidence to support this hypothesis until recently. Thus we conducted spectroscopic observations of the 2001 Leonid meteor shower by using intensified HDTV cameras equipped with a reflective grating which covers 300-700 nm wavelength range. In order to minimize the effect of air extinction near 300 nm, the observations were performed at a high elevation, i.e., the Subaru Telescope Hawaii observatory (h=4,100 m) and Nobeyama Radio Observatory (h=1,340 m) of National Astronomical Observatory of Japan. Spectral features of hydroxyl radicals in the cometary meteoroids were clearly observed. In this paper, we show the first result of detection of OH emission from the ground and discuss on the origin of the discovered OH A-X (0,0) band.