Journal article
Observations of interplanetary dust by the Juno magnetometer investigation : Juno: Interplanetary Dust Detection
National Space Institute, Technical University of Denmark1
Measurement and Instrumentation Systems, National Space Institute, Technical University of Denmark2
University of Copenhagen3
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center4
Southwest Research Institute5
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology6
One of the Juno magnetometer investigation's star cameras was configured to search for unidentified objects during Juno's transit en route to Jupiter. This camera detects and registers luminous objects to magnitude 8. Objects persisting in more than five consecutive images and moving with an apparent angular rate of between 2 and 18,000 arcsec/s were recorded.
Among the objects detected were a small group of objects tracked briefly in close proximity to the spacecraft. The trajectory of these objects demonstrates that they originated on the Juno spacecraft, evidently excavated by micrometeoroid impacts on the solar arrays. The majority of detections occurred just prior to and shortly after Juno's transit of the asteroid belt.
This rather novel detection technique utilizes the Juno spacecraft's prodigious 60 m2 of solar array as a dust detector and provides valuable information on the distribution and motion of interplanetary (>μm sized) dust.
Language: | English |
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Year: | 2017 |
Pages: | 4701-4708 |
ISSN: | 00948276 and 19448007 |
Types: | Journal article |
DOI: | 10.1002/2017GL073186 |
ORCIDs: | Benn, Mathias , Jørgensen, John Leif , Denver, Troelz , Jørgensen, Peter Siegbjørn , 0000-0001-8169-7273 , 0000-0001-7478-6462 , 0000-0002-9115-0789 , 0000-0003-2242-5459 and Brauer, Peter |