Welcome to the new version of CaltechAUTHORS. Login is currently restricted to library staff. If you notice any issues, please email coda@library.caltech.edu
Published September 2004 | public
Journal Article

The Cassini Cosmic Dust Analyzer

Abstract

The Cassini-Huygens Cosmic Dust Analyzer (CDA) is intended to provide direct observations of dust grains with masses between 10^(−19) and 10^(−9) kg in interplanetary space and in the jovian and saturnian systems, to investigate their physical, chemical and dynamical properties as functions of the distances to the Sun, to Jupiter and to Saturn and its satellites and rings, to study their interaction with the saturnian rings, satellites and magnetosphere. Chemical composition of interplanetary meteoroids will be compared with asteroidal and cometary dust, as well as with Saturn dust, ejecta from rings and satellites. Ring and satellites phenomena which might be effects of meteoroid impacts will be compared with the interplanetary dust environment. Electrical charges of particulate matter in the magnetosphere and its consequences will be studied, e.g. the effects of the ambient plasma and the magnetic field on the trajectories of dust particles as well as fragmentation of particles due to electrostatic disruption. The investigation will be performed with an instrument that measures the mass, composition, electric charge, speed, and flight direction of individual dust particles. It is a highly reliable and versatile instrument with a mass sensitivity 10^6 times higher than that of the Pioneer 10 and 11 dust detectors which measured dust in the saturnian system. The Cosmic Dust Analyzer has significant inheritance from former space instrumentation developed for the VEGA, Giotto, Galileo, and Ulysses missions. It will reliably measure impacts from as low as 1 impact per month up to 10^4 impacts per second. The instrument weighs 17 kg and consumes 12 W, the integrated time-of-flight mass spectrometer has a mass resolution of up to 50. The nominal data transmission rate is 524 bits/s and varies between 50 and 4192 bps.

Additional Information

© 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Received 12 March 1998; Accepted in final form 7 January 2002. The development, construction, implementation and testing of this instrument and its data processing system was only achieved by the efforts of a great number of individuals from various departments of the Max-Planck-Institut für Kernphysik and from outside institutions and companies. The authors are especially indebted to many coworkers who supported the team at MPI-K, DLR-Berlin, UK Canterbury, ESTEC and RAL. We are grateful to G. Pahl who designed the instrument and to A. Kaiser and S. Helfert who developed significant parts of the onboard software. This project is supported by the Max-Planck-Institut für Kernphysik and by the DLR under the grant 50OH91019.

Additional details

Created:
August 22, 2023
Modified:
October 18, 2023