Dust Measurements Between Earth and Saturn by the Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter of the New Horizons Mission

Details Dust Measurements Between Earth and Saturn by the Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter of the New Horizons Mission Dust Measurements Between Earth and Saturn by the Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter of the New Horizons Mission

Dec 2008

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2008agufm.p31a1388j&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2008, abstract #P31A-1388

Physics

Space Physics

2129 Interplanetary Dust, 2194 Instruments And Techniques

Scientific paper

The Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter (VSDC) on the New Horizons mission is a dust impact detector designed to map the interplanetary dust distribution along the trajectory of the spacecraft as it traverses our solar system. VSDC is the first student-built instrument on a deep space mission and is currently operated by a small group of undergraduate and graduate students at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP), University of Colorado. VSDC is based on permanently polarized thin plastic film sensors that generate an electrical signal when a dust particle impacts them. The total surface area is about 0.1 square meters and the detection threshold is about 1 micron in radius. By the time of this meeting (12/2008), VSDC will have operated for about 500 days, and will have data covering an approximate distance of 1.2 to 11.0 AU from the Sun. In this talk, we will briefly review the VSDC instrument, including the in-flight calibrations and tests. We will report on the measured spatial and size distribution of interplanetary dust particles before and after the New Horizons encounter with Jupiter. These data will also be compared to earlier measurements by Ulysses and Galileo.

Affiliated with

Also associated with

No associations

Rating

Dust Measurements Between Earth and Saturn by the Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter of the New Horizons Mission does not yet have a rating. At this time, there are no reviews or comments for this scientific paper.

If you have personal experience with Dust Measurements Between Earth and Saturn by the Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter of the New Horizons Mission, we encourage you to share that experience with our LandOfFree.com community. Your opinion is very important and Dust Measurements Between Earth and Saturn by the Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter of the New Horizons Mission will most certainly appreciate the feedback.

Rate now

Comments { 0 }

Profile ID: LFWR-SCP-O-1237075