SCIENCE: RELATED SCIENCE

Who Else Is Doing This Kind of Stuff?

There have been, are, and will be a number of instruments and experiments that look at cosmic dust and its properties. Listed below are 10 such missions or experiments and a little about each one. These 10 missions are by no means all the missions that have ever measured dust, but they do represent a healthy slice of what can be done with the technology. As an example, the image to the right displays the dust collection array from the Stardust mission. Dust hits each of these bins and strikes a substance known as aerogel (which will be discussed later). These cells are on their way back to Earth, where scientists will extract the dust from the cells and study it. And this is just one of the many collectors being used!

BepiColombo
BepiColombo is the name of an approved mission to Mercury put forth by the ESA. This mission is slated to launch in 2011 or 2012. The dust counting instrument that will go onboard is called SERENA. This instrument will look at the ions in the exosphere of Mercury. This will be quite helpful as we know very little about Mercury and anything we learn will help us understand this hot planet.

Cassini
The highly successful Cassini mission is a recent mission that was sent to study Saturn. Onboard this mission is an instrument known as the CDA. The CDA (or Cosmic Dust Analyzer) is designed to measure size, speed, and direction of dust grains out near Saturn. The goal of the instrument is to learn more about for formation of celestial bodies and where these small particles of dust come from.

Cosmic DUNE
Cosmic DUNE is a proposed mission to measure dust while in Earth orbit. The instument would measure interstellar and interplanetary dust while remaining close to Earth for easy control and maipulation. This project is being put forward to the ESA, and uses the same technology as the Mars Express.

Galileo
Galileo is a mission that was sent to look at Jupiter. There were many instuments on board, but the instrument we care about in particluar was the Galileo Dust Detector. The job of this instrument was to examine dust in the Jovian system to see where it comes from, where it goes, and what happens to it in between.

GORID
GORID is an experiment that was put forth to measure dust and debris in the geostationary orbit. There are many satellites in this orbit, and the goal of GORID was to better understand how much debris is in this region and what kind of threat it posesses to satellites. GORID was yet another project of the ESA.

Hiten
Hiten was a Japanese satellite launched in 1990 to study dust in between the Earth and the Moon. The actual dust counting instument, called the Munich Dust Counter, transmitted backdata until 1993 when the spacecraft was crashed into the Moon intentionally. The Munich Dust Counter was the only instrument aboard Hiten.

Nozomi
Nozomi was the name of a Japanese mission to Mars. Unfortunately, the mission failed due to a mistimed thruster boost and a hardware failure. The dust counting instument aboard Nozomi was called the Mars Dust Counter and it was meant to measure dust coming from Mars itself as well as Phobos and Deimos.

Pioneers 10 & 11
The late Pioneer missions gave us our first detailed explorations of Jupiter and Saturn. While certainly not noted for their dust counting instruments, both of these missions had them. The detector was an instrument called the Meteroid Detector which used cells of argon and nitrogen to measure penetration by meteoroids. Both of these satellites have flown out of detectable range.

Stardust
Stardust is a current NASA mission to collect dust from the tail of a comet. While this is the main goal of the spacecraft, it has others, and thus the instrument we have interest in is the Dust Flux Instrument. The unique goal of this instrument is to collect dust from the tail of comet Wild 2 and return it to Earth for scientists to analyze.

Ulysses
The Ulysses probe, possibly the most successful joint NASA/ESA mission ever flown, has the primary goal of studying the Sun from every angle and latitude. However, the mission also has a dust counter on board which is identical to the one that was used on the Galileo mission. The dust counter on this mission ran for over 14 years, making the Ulysses data set very comprehensive!

What Have Other People Found Out?
For the missions listed above that are in progress or have already been completed, what have we found? One might think this a hard question to answer, but it's actually quite easy. Luckily for us, a large number of the above missions are covered by the Heidelberg Dust Research Group. This group is interested in a lot of the dust counters and what kind of cumulative data can be gathered and shared amongst all these projects. So what have other people found out? Check the Dust Group and see!

How Has This Research Impacted My Life?

"Great. So a bunch of people have learned a bunch of junk about dust in space. Why on Earth does anyone care? Why on Earth does any of it matter?" This might be what you're thinking.

But dust research is imporant. Take a look at the image on the right. What you are looking at is a substance known as aerogel. Aerogel was a relatively unused material until NASA scientists started using it to collect dust on some of their missions. So what is it? Aerogel is a solid silicon material that is 99.8% empty air. The rest of it is kind of like glass. But unlike glass, aerogel gives almost 40 times as much insulation as fiberglass as well as being far, far lighter.

This just goes to show how some very interesting and unexpected things come out of NASA research. A lot more than one would expect! So even if you don't particularly care about the dust counters, keep looking to NASA for all sorts of interesting inventions and devices!

Why Does There Need to be More Research?
Each of the above missions looks at different kinds of dust or looks at it in different ways. BepiColombo will look at the dust around Mercury. Cassini looks at the dust around Saturn. Cosmic DUNE will look at dust around the Earth. Galileo looked at it around Jupiter. Etc., etc.

What makes the Student Dust Counter unique is that it will be looking at dust in the outer reaches of the solar system ( Pluto and the Kuiper Belt) with unprecedented accuracy. Many things out past Pluto are almost the same as they were when the solar system formed; so by looking at this dust we can begin to better understand how things were back at the formation of the solar system.