Early models were often phenomenological or empirical in nature and sometimes created ad hoc interplanetary dust distributions (i.e., not necessarily associated with a definite source) in order to explain discrete sets of observations (e.g., Divine 1993). In the inner solar system, observations and models over many decades have striven to define the interplanetary dust distribution, including both the velocity distribution and the overall flux. Note that this review does not cover impacts on airless bodies, apart from a brief mention of the Moon and Mercury. While this is not an exhaustive review, there is discussion of impacts on all planets with atmospheres, as well as on Pluto, Triton and Titan. 6) and the effects of the surface deposition of meteoric debris (Sect. 5) perturbations to atmospheric gas-phase chemistry (Sect. 4) meteoric smoke particles and cloud nucleation (Sect. The next four sections describe a variety of atmospheric impacts, some observed and others predicted by models: layers of metal atoms and ions (Sect. 2, followed by a discussion of meteoric ablation in Sect. 3. In this review, the advances in interplanetary dust modelling are described in Sect. In parallel, significant advances in understanding the nature of the ablation process-though a combination of experimental simulation and modelling-means that the injection of individual meteoric constituents into a planetary atmosphere, and the consequent impacts, can be determined with much greater confidence. Continual improvements in observations (both in situ and remote) and dynamical modelling have slowly but surely defined these quantities throughout the solar system. These distributions are necessary not only for determining the overall mass influx of exogenous material to planetary atmospheres, but also for accurately quantifying the fraction of the incoming mass that ablates (since not all grains that enter a planetary atmosphere will fully ablate), the altitudes at which ablation occurs, the chemical evolution of the ablated products after injection into an atmosphere, and the degree of modification of the material deposited at the surface. Critical to our understanding of how interplanetary dust affects the atmospheres of solar system bodies is an accurate understanding of the mass and velocity distributions of interplanetary dust grains throughout the solar system.
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