Helios spacecraft data revisited: Detection of cometary meteoroid trails by in-situ dust impacts

Abstract

Cometary meteoroid trails exist in the vicinity of comets, forming fine structure of the interplanetary dust cloud. The trails consist predominantly of cometary particles with sizes of approximately 0.1 mm to 1 cm which are ejected at low speeds and remain very close to the comet orbit for several revolutions around the Sun. When re-analysing the Helios dust data measured in the 1970s, Altobelli et al. (2006) recognized a clustering of seven impacts, detected in a very narrow region of space at a true anomaly angle of 135 deg, which the authors considered as potential cometary trail particles. We re-analyse these candidate cometary trail particles to investigate the possibility that some or all of them indeed originate from cometary trails and we constrain their source comets. The Interplanetary Meteoroid Environment for eXploration (IMEX) dust streams in space model is a new universal model for cometary meteoroid streams in the inner solar system, developed by Soja et al. (2015). Using IMEX we study cometary trail traverses by Helios. During ten revolutions around the Sun, and in the narrow region of space where Helios detected the candidate dust particles, the spacecraft repeatedly traversed the trails of comets 45P/Honda-Mrkos-Pajduvsakova and 72P/Denning-Fujikawa. Based on the detection times and particle impact directions, four detected particles are compatible with an origin from these two comets. We find a dust spatial density in these trails of about 10^-8 to 10^-7 m^-3. The in-situ detection and analysis of meteoroid trail particles which can be traced back to their source bodies by spacecraft-based dust analysers opens a new window to remote compositional analysis of comets and asteroids without the necessity to fly a spacecraft to or even land on those celestial bodies. This provides new science opportunities for future missions like Destiny+, Europa Clipper and IMAP.

13 pages, 9 Figures, 2 Tables, accepted for pubication by Astronomy and Astrophysics

References in corpus (9)

• The tensile strength of dust aggregates consisting of small elastic grains: Constraints on the size of condensates in protoplanetary disks
• Evidence for dust accumulation just outside the orbit of Venus
• 2014-2015 Multiple Outbursts of 15P/Finlay
• Co-orbital Asteroids as the Source of Venus's Zodiacal Dust Ring
• Parker Solar Probe Observations of a Dust Trail in the Orbit of (3200) Phaethon
• DIRBE Comet Trails
• Interstellar Dust in the Solar System: Model versus In-Situ Spacecraft Data
• The Morphological, Elastic, and Electric Properties of Dust Aggregates in Comets: A Close Look at COSIMA/Rosetta's Data on Dust in Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko
• Effects of neighbouring planets on the formation of resonant dust rings in the inner Solar System

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Parker Solar Probe: Four Years of Discoveries at Solar Cycle Minimum
• Learning about comets from the study of mass distributions and fluxes of meteoroid streams
• Formation, Structure, and Detectability of the Geminids Meteoroid Stream
• WISE/NEOWISE Multi-Epoch Imaging of the Potentially Geminid-related Asteroids: (3200) Phaethon, 2005 UD and 1999 YC
• Synergies between interstellar dust and heliospheric science with an Interstellar Probe