| ||||||||
| ||||||||
Primary Investigator: I. Apathy,
KFKI Budapest.
The Dust Impact Monitor experiment detects the
impact of dust particles which hit the detector mounted at the top of
the Rosetta Lander.When volatile material of the comet - mainly water ice - evaporates, it is able to lift off embedded non-volatiles such as dust grains, pebbles and even boulders up to the size of a meter. If particles in such a gaseous jet gain enough speed to escape the comet's gravity they are lost in space and form the cometary dust tail. Particles which are too slow will - sooner or later - fall back onto the surface. When such a particle hits the DIM-sensor (a piezo-electrical plate on top of the Lander, similar to those used for CASSE), an electrical pulse is measured which gives information about the momentum of the particle. The DIM experiment can give us the amount of back-falling material and its size distribution. This leads to a better understanding of the composition of the cometary surface material ('regolith'), the inner composition through the rate of outgassing and tells us, how the comet spreads its material into open space. | ||||||||
|
[ Deutsch | Planetary Physics | SESAME | CASSE | PP ] | ||||||||
