The New Horizons spacecraft has travelled through the Solar System and has reached a distance of 55 AU as of 2023. For one of the first times, the dust flux in the outer Solar System has been measured, using the instrument Student Dust Counter (SDC) onboard New Horizons. Between 30 and 50 AU is the Kuiper belt, which is a disk consisting of icy objects. These objects can undergo collisions, causing ...

The partly ionized ionosphere responds differently to high power, high frequency radio waves based on the wave frequency, the wave power, the wave polarization, and the propagation angle relative to the magnetic field. Ionospheric modification experiments are conducted to investigate the responses and their dependencies, setting experimental constraints on the contributions from non-resonant collisional ...

This work is focused on the three sounding rocket launches during the ECOMA Geminids campaign in December 2010: One before the Geminids meteor shower, one at its peak and one some days after the peak. In this work, the main emphasis is on analyzing the results from electron and ion probes on the rockets, obtaining electron and ion density profiles, and comparing them with the measurements of meteoric ...

The mission Parker Solar Probe (PSP) provides a new opportunity to make in-situ measurements of dust impacts closer to the Sun than ever before, eventually going as close as ∼ 10 solar radii or ∼ 0.05 AU. PSP can measure dust impacts from monopole measurements of the spacecraft’s electric potential to one of its antennas using its FIELDS instrument. In this work impact rates data is compared ...

Geomagnetic field models can be a useful tool for when and where there are no measurements available, or access is limited, because of a highly spatially uneven magnetometer network around the globe. The same can be said for altitudes above the ground, but below the ionospheric current layer, where there exist no in situ measurements at the point of writing. Modelled geomagnetic disturbances have ...

The plasma line in the incoherent scatter spectrum is known to provide information about the state of the ionosphere. However, it is weak in signal strength and therefore difficult to measure reliably and consistently. When high-energetic electrons (suprathermal electrons) are present in the ionosphere the plasma line echo power is enhanced and detectable by more radars. Recent measurements made by ...

Using a resonance lidar, atomic Na (sodium) can be observed in the 80-110 km altitude range of the atmosphere. Na belongs to the alkali metal group and is highly reactive, so one could expect that it would quickly react with other particles and leave its atomic state. Its actual behaviour however includes the formation of relatively dense layers which, from the perspective of a stationary lidar, ...

The ionosphere is a region of the upper atmosphere where a significant rate of photo-ionisation from solar ultraviolet radiation cause an increased plasma density. In this region a system of electrical currents flow, driven by electric fields generated by fluctuating dynamics within the Earths magnetosphere. These fluctuating dynamics are caused by interactions between the magnetosphere and the solar ...

We study the conditions within, and dynamics of fragmented mesospheric dust particles inside, the Faraday-cup type dust probe MUDD using numerical simulations with a dedicated model. The transport of singly charged fragments from impacting NLC particles on the main grid in MUDD, have been calculated on the basis of supplementary models of the neutral gas conditions and electric field structure within ...

The rapid rotation of Jupiter and Saturn, combined with internal source of plasma provided by their moons Io and Enceladus respectively, creates a magnetodisk structure of the planetary magnetic field. The magnetodisk looks like a stretched dipole magnetic field in the equatorial region, where centrifugal force is largest. The centrifugal force, originating in the rotating frame, is known to have ...