Interstellar Dust in the Inner Heliosphere and Impact Detection Capabilities with ESA's Solar Orbiter Spacecraft
Permanent lenke
https://hdl.handle.net/10037/25899Dato
2022-05-31Type
Master thesisMastergradsoppgave
Forfatter
Henriksen, Aleksander JohanSammendrag
ESA’s Solar Orbiter spacecraft provides a new opportunity to investigate the
inner heliosphere close to sun, by taking measurements with state-of-the-art
instruments it will help uncover the mysteries of the Sun. Solar Orbiter is
planned for a 7 year mission, reaching as close as 0.28 AU to the sun. Using
a process called impact ionization, dust fluxes can be measured during the
mission. Some dust particles that reside outside our solar system in the local
interstellar clouds can enter the solar system from an upstream direction of
258° Heliocentric Ecliptic Longitude. These dust particles are referred to as
interstellar dust.
This Master Thesis looks at the prospect of using ESA’s Solar Orbiter for interstellar dust detection through dust impact measurements. Models have been
created in this thesis to describe the interstellar dust trajectories and impact
velocities on the spacecraft. Comparing possible impact velocities during the
orbit to measured dust fluxes helps to interpret the observational data. This
has been done for interstellar dust and for interplanetary dust particles in
unbound orbits around the sun. The trajectories are determined by solar radiation pressure force and solar gravity. This work does not consider Lorentz
Forces in any of the calculations, as it can be assumed all calculated particles
have a low enough charge to mass ratio to not be heavily affected by magnetic
forces.
Impact velocities from interstellar dust are found to range from 40 km/s to
80 km/s when Solar Orbiter travels in the upstream direction (80° to 270°),
with the more gravitational dominated particles reaching the highest velocities.
Dust impact data show that interplanetary dust particles contribute more to the
measured dust flux than interstellar dust when Solar Orbiter is closer to the sun,
and the interstellar dust upstream direction (258°) could not be measured with
the data. The model calculations show that the gravitational focusing region
behind the sun (78°) has a high population density of interstellar dust and high
impact velocities and future work should be directed to this region.
Forlag
UiT Norges arktiske universitetUiT The Arctic University of Norway
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