Interstellar Dust Module for the ESA Meteoroid Model
Abstract
The ESA meteoroid model predicts impacts of meteoroids in the mass range between to g on spacecraft surfaces. It covers heliocentric distances from 0.3 to 20 AU. Measurements of the dust detector on board the highly successful joint ESA/NASA mission Ulysses have shown, that the flux of meteoroids with masses between and g is, at least in the outer Solar System, dominated by interstellar dust grains that traverse the Solar System as it travels through the local interstellar cloud. We present a simple semi-analytic interstellar dust model that can easily be included in the ESA meteoroid model, together with a more precise determination of the flux direction of the interstellar dust stream. The model is based on the assumption that interstellar dust dynamics have two effects: solar gravitation and radiation pressure determines the spatial distribution, and Lorentz-interaction of the charged particles creates a temporal variation.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0104278,
title = {Interstellar Dust Module for the ESA Meteoroid Model},
author = {M. Landgraf and R. Jehn and N. Altobelli and V. Dikarev and E. Grün},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0104278},
year = {2007}
}
Comments
3 pages, 4 figures, uses LaTeX2e, esaproc.cls, and authordate.sty, to appear in Proceedings of the 3rd European Space Debris Conference, 19.-21. March 2001 Darmstadt