The Parker Solar Probe (PSP) mission by NASA and the Solar Orbiter (SolO) mission by ESA are two recently launched missions that measure dust in the inner solar system. The dust is produced by fragmentation of meteoroids, which are large fragments of the asteroids and comets. The dust particles are small enough that their motion is affected by the radiation pressure force from the Sun. Dust fragments ...

The primary focus of this thesis is the installation and characterization of an electron bombardment ion source for a Space Simulation Chamber (SSC). The goal is that the chamber can be used to test satellite and sounding rocket instrumentation, thus be capable of producing ionospheric plasma conditions, along with an ion beam that can simulate the velocity of a rocket or satellite relative to the ...

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 ...

The mesosphere is perhaps the least explored region in the atmosphere with very few methods of observing. This thesis will primarily be exploring a new technique for measuring the distribution of kinetic energy in the mesosphere across a wide range of spatial and temporal scales. The method being used relies on correlation functions between pairs of meteor measurements. These measurements are made ...

In this thesis I first introduce multifractal theory and mathematical concepts for multifractal analysis. Different methods for different uses are described, with focus on a differentiating between coarse and fine theory approaches. Methods for analysing time series are also described, more specificly a direct method based on the coarse theory analysis, the wavelet transform modulus maxima ...

Bottom trawling is used to capture fish species that live in the seabed. The damage on the seabed trawling causes has been discussed for many years. This thesis aims to investigate whether bottom trawling for sand eels can be a cause for some of the detected oil seepages in the North Sea. We investigated this using manual delineation of oil seepages in Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellite ...

As meteoroids enter the Earth’s atmosphere, the majority will fully evaporate in the altitude region 70–110 km, due to the frictional heating from atmospheric interactions. The evaporated material is thought to re-condense and coagulate into nanometer sized particles called meteoric smoke particles (MSP). These particles are thought to be a central component in the formation of noctilucent clouds ...

The Smoke Particle Impact Detector (SPID), newly designed at the University of Tromsø, was launched from Andøya 09:13 UTC the 13. January 2019. SPID is designed to detect meteoric smoke particles (MSPs) in winter mesospheric conditions. The rocket had a velocity of 1600 ms-1 at ~55 km where the nosecone was separated. At ~ 60km, SPID detected a signal of 17nA on the middle plate. The dynamics of the ...

Plasma cloud formation from arcing is experimentally studied. The arcs are formed by a high voltage set-up in the space simulation chamber at UiT. The plasma clouds are observed as large structures in the time series recorded by Langmuir probe and reference probe. By using the method of conditional averaging, the structures are accentuated. The electron cloud formed by arcing was found to be ...

Polar Mesospheric Winter Echoes (PMWE) are strong coherent radar echoes, from the upper mesosphere at 55-85 km that are observed typically from end of August until beginning of May. Some models to explain PMWE formation suggest that they form because of turbulence in the atmosphere. Other models suggest that the PMWEs form like summer polar mesospheric echoes (PMSE) where charged dust particles ...