The Astrophysical Dust Group focuses on the science of cosmic dust nearby and inside the solar system and is based on the European Research Council Starting Grant “ASTRODUST: The Heliosphere and the Dust: Characterization of the Solar and Interstellar Neighbourhood”. The project receives funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement Nº851544. Read more about our research.
A new paper was published with a re-analysis of the Ulysses mission’s interstellar dust data. It tells us whether the biggest (micrometer sized) interstellar dust in the dataset are really interstellar, it shows the method to infer the modulation of interstellar dust in the heliosphere’s boundary region, and investigates the selection biases for interstellar versus interplanetary dust in the dataset.
Tim Arnet (former Master student of the Astrodust group) has started his work as a research assistant, focusing mainly on charging of cosmic dust in different regions of the heliosphere and on dust trajectory simulations throughout the heliosphere. Tim has graduated from the Astrodust group in 2024, where he already participated very successfully in a project concerning the dust environment for the Lunar Gateway.
Impacts of cosmic dust particles can be measured with the plasma wave antenna instrument onboard the Wind spacecraft at the Sun-Earth Lagrange point L1. Using these data, we discovered signatures of the solar rotation in the dust impact data, finding another synergy between dust science and heliophysics.
Megha Choudhary and Alessandra Bergese, Master’s students in Aerospace Engineering from ISAE-SUPAERO in Toulouse, France, have been selected to present their work at the upcoming Space Cost Engineering Conference
