Traversing the Trailing Dust Cloud in the Earth's Resonant Ring - Part 3

Details Traversing the Trailing Dust Cloud in the Earth's Resonant Ring - Part 3 Traversing the Trailing Dust Cloud in the Earth's Resonant Ring - Part 3

May 2006

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2006sptz.prop30667j&link_type=abstract

Spitzer Proposal ID #30667

Physics

Scientific paper

We propose continuing observations for monitoring the Earth's Resonant Ring. The unique Earth trailing orbit of Spitzer traverses this heliocentric ring of dust particles at 1 AU. The dust particles in this ring, produced by the grinding down of asteroids in the main belt, spiral into the inner Solar System due to drag forces and are trapped into resonant orbits in the vicinity of Earth. Azimuthal structures in the ring result in a dust cloud that follows the Earth in its wake. This trailing dust cloud produces a flux asymmetry - the radiation in the direction trailing the Earth's orbital motion is higher than the flux in the leading direction by approximately 1.7 MJy/Sr (2-3%). The only confirmed detection of a structure in a disk caused by a known planet, it constrains the mass and location of a planetary perturber embedded in a circumstellar disk. As Spitzer is entering this trailing cloud, the next year is critical because the dynamical model predicts that the flux asymmetry will increase to >7 MJy/Sr, reversing direction in 2006. In Cycles 3 as in 1 & 2 we propose 3 sets of observations : TPM mode at the eclipitic, at the poles, and 12 deg scans across the ecliptic to filter the asteroidal dust bands. These will be combined with calibration observations from IRS and IRAC for a multi-wavelength study of the ring. Since the resonant trapping of particles into the ring is a function of particle size, these observations will constrain particle size-frequency distribution using our dynamical model of the ring. The study of Earth's resonant ring will(1) measure the variations of the local zodiacal foreground over the lifetime of Spitzer; (2) constrain the size-frequency distribution, and estimate the number density, of dust in the near-Earth interplanetary environment; (3) act as a case study for the formation and structure of resonant rings in debris disks, associated with the existence of planets embedded in nearby stars.

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