Related papers: Micrometeoroid Events in LISA Pathfinder
We identify stars with large proper motions that are potential candidates for the astrometric microlensing effect during the Gaia mission i.e. between 2012 and 2019. The effect allows a precise measurement of the mass of a single star that…
The Ulysses spacecraft has been orbiting the Sun on a highly inclined ellipse almost perpendicular to the ecliptic plane (inclination 79 deg, perihelion distance 1.3 AU, aphelion distance 5.4 AU) since it encountered Jupiter in 1992. The…
Video observations of Jupiter obtained by amateur astronomers over the past eight years have shown five flashes of light of 1-2 s. The first three of these events occurred on 3 June 2010, 20 August 2010, and 10 September 2012. Previous…
Using the Moon to occult the Sun, the Clementine spacecraft used its navigation cameras to map the inner zodiacal light at optical wavelengths over elongations of 3-30 degrees from the Sun. This surface brightness map is then used to infer…
Context. The populations of small bodies of the Solar System (asteroids, comets, Kuiper-Belt objects) are used to constrain the origin and evolution of the Solar System. Both their orbital distribution and composition distribution are…
The Gaia mission will provide precise astrometry for an unprecedented number of white dwarfs (WDs), encoding information on stellar evolution, Type Ia supernovae progenitor scenarios, and the star formation and dynamical history of the…
Measuring the masses of protoplanetary disks is crucial for understanding their planet-forming potential. Typically, dust masses are derived from (sub-)millimeter flux density measurements plus assumptions for the opacity, temperature, and…
The MIDAS (Micro-Imaging Dust Analysis System) atomic force microscope on board the Rosetta comet orbiter investigated and measured the 3D topography of a few hundred nm to tens of $\mu$m sized dust particles of 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko…
We report on dust measurements obtained during the seventh orbit of the Galileo spacecraft about Jupiter. %which had a close flyby at Ganymede. The most prominent features observed are highly time variable dust streams recorded throughout…
The drag-free satellites of LISA will maintain the test masses in geodesic motion over many years with residual accelerations at unprecedented small levels and time delay interferometry (TDI) will keep track of their differential positions…
The dust measured in debris disks traces the position of planetesimal belts. In our Solar System, we are also able to measure the largest planetesimals directly and can extrapolate down to make an estimate of the dust. The zodiacal dust…
Macrospicules (MS) are localised small-scale jet-like phenomena in the solar atmosphere, which have the potential to transport considerable amount of momentum and energy from the lower solar atmospheric regions to the Transition Region and…
We present a novel method to detect variable astrophysical objects and transient phenomena using anomalous excess scatter in repeated measurements from public catalogs of Gaia DR2 and Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) DR3 photometry. We first…
In the early 1990s, after its Jupiter flyby, the Ulysses spacecraft identified interstellar dust in the solar system. Since then the in-situ dust detector on board Ulysses continuously monitored interstellar grains with masses up to 10e-13…
This paper presents a quantitative assessment of the performance of the upcoming LISA Pathfinder geodesic explorer mission. The findings are based on the results of extensive ground testing and simulation campaigns using flight hardware and…
A circumsolar dust ring has been recently discovered close to the orbit of Mercury. There are currently no hypotheses for the origin of this ring in the literature, so we explore four different origin scenarios here: the dust originated…
LISA Pathfinder was a mission designed to test key technologies required for gravitational wave detection in space. Magnetically driven forces play a key role in the instrument sensitivity in the low-frequency regime, which corresponds to…
Impacts from icy and rocky bodies have helped shape the composition of solar system objects, for example the Earth-Moon system, or the recent impact of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 with Jupiter. It is likely that such impacts also shape the…
Fireball observations from camera networks provide position and time information along the trajectory of a meteoroid that is transiting our atmosphere. The complete dynamical state of the meteoroid at each measured time can be estimated…
The zodiacal light is a night-glow mostly visible along the plane of the ecliptic. It represents the background radiation associated with solar light scattered by the tenuous flattened interplanetary cloud of dust particles surrounding the…