Group excursion to the dust accelerator facility at University of Stuttgart
Together with ETH's Nanoparticle Systems Engineering group, the Astrodust group visited the dust accelerator in Stuttgart, successfully testing their very own dust analogues.
After meeting up with Prof. Dr. Inge Herrmann's group of Nanoparticle Systems Engineers, it took us only a short train ride to arrive at Stuttgart Universität. Greeted by Dr. Yanwei Li and Maximilian Sommer, we briefly explored the sprawling campus in search of lunch, before finding ourselves in the laboratories underneath Campus Vaihingen. There, Dr. Li showed us the Stuttgart Dust Accelerator (SDA) -- the most powerful electrostatic dust accelerator in Europe! We could catch a quick glimpse of the DESTINY+ Dust Analyzer (DDA), which will be flying to space on the JAXA/DLR space mission DESTINY+ in 2024. In a series of exciting tests, the dust analogues of our very own semester project student Kristina Biedermann were tested in the brand new dust accelerator of Dr. Li -- and, success, her dust flew like a charm!
We celebrated with a detour to the office of Dr. Li, where the legacy dust accelerator -- an old acquaintance of Dr. Sterken -- is still in frequent use. Dr. Li showed us his diligently curated collection of dust analogues, some of which are five decades old! Fortifying ourselves with coffee at the Raumfahrtzentrum Baden-Württemberg (RZBW), we marveled at the exhibited models of many spacecrafts and the flying SOFIA observatory, before hurrying back to the train station to catch our ride home. Inspired by what we had seen, and encouraged by our success, we spent the train ride dreaming about what the future might hold back here in Zürich.
Group Prof. Herrmann ETHZ
external pageIRS Univ. Stuttgart
