Swedish Space Plasma Physics Workshop 2016, Stockholm, KTH

Detection of meteoroid hypervelocity impacts on Cluster spacecraft: First results

Not scheduled

KTH Royal Institute of Technology

Speaker

Jakub Vaverka (Department of Physics, Umeå University, Sweden)

Description

There are several different techniques that are used to measure cosmic dust entering the Earth's atmosphere such as space-born dust detectors, meteor and HPLA radars, and optical methods. One complementary method could be to use electric field instruments initially designed to measure electric waves. A plasma cloud generated by a hypervelocity dust impact on a spacecraft body can be detected by the electric field instruments commonly operated on the spacecraft. Since Earth-orbiting missions are generally not equipped with conventional dust detectors, the electric field instruments offer an alternative method to measure the Earth's dust environment. We present the first detection of dust impacts on one of the Earth-orbiting Cluster satellites by the Wide-Band Data (WBD) instrument. We describe the concept of dust impact detection focused on specifics of the Cluster spacecraft and the WBD instrument. We estimate the size and the velocity of the impinging dust grains from the amplitude of the Cluster voltage pulses and discuss sensitivity of this method for dust grain detection.