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Free keywords:
Ulysses, interplanetary dust, cometary dust trails, IMEX, space dust
Abstract:
The Ulysses spacecraft was launched in 1990 and,
after a Jupiter swing-by in 1992, became the first
interplanetary spacecraft orbiting the Sun on a
highly inclined trajectory with an inclination of
79∘
. The spacecraft was equipped with an impact
ionization dust detector which provided 17 years of
in situ dust measurements in interplanetary space
from 1990 to 2007. Cometary meteoroid streams
(also referred to as trails) exist along the orbits of
comets, forming fine structures of the interplanetary
dust cloud. We use the Interplanetary Meteoroid
Environment for eXploration (IMEX) dust streams
in space model (Soja RH, et al. 2015 Characteristics
of the dust trail of 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko: an
application of the IMEX model. Astron. Astrophys. 583,
A18. (doi:10.1051/0004-6361/201526184)) to predict
cometary stream traverses by Ulysses and re-analyse
the Ulysses dust dataset in order to identify impacts
of cometary stream particles detected during such
trail traverses. We identify 19 particles compatible
with three Ulysses trail traverses on 12 March 1995,
25–27 April 2001 and 16–19 May 2001. The particle
origin is compatible with up to five comets, i.e. 10P/
Tempel 2, 146P/Shoemaker-LINEAR, 267P/LONEOS
and possibly 45P/Honda-Mrkos-Pajdušáková and P/
1999 RO28 (LONEOS). We find a dust spatial density
in these trails of approximately 2 − 7 ⋅ 10−8 m−3
. The
radii of the detected cometary stream particles
derived from the dust instrument calibration are
in the micrometre range. The in situ analysis of
meteoroid trail particles in space, which can be traced
