The Detectability of Debris Particle Clouds

The unresolved mystery of dust particle swarms within the magnetosphere

“…The swarms were observed at all altitudes up to 60 000 km. In SRM GEO insertions, the exhaust dust is expelled rather retrograde such that the maximum obtainable apogee of ejected particles is near the GEO altitude (about 36 000 km) (Mueller and Kessler, 1985;Bunte, 2003). On the other hand, the orbit of HEOS-2 was oriented such that the spacecraft reached its far-out apogee near the ecliptic north direction, causing it to spend only very limited time near the equatorial region.…”

“…It is conceivable that orbital perturbations could have caused SRM dust formations to drift from their origin region to where the swarms were observed. However, it is questionable whether these displacements could take place in the lifetimes of SRM dust streams, which are limited by atmospheric drag (at most 1-2 months for particles <1 µm in size (Friesen et al, 1992;Bunte, 2003)). Moreover, electrodynamic perturbations on Earth-orbiting dust particles tend to dissipate their orbital energy, adding to the orbital decay due to atmospheric drag (Juhász and Horányi, 1997).…”

“…GORID data indicated a significant excess of clustered impacts, which were characterized by separations in time from minutes to an hour, dominating over random impacts by a factor of about four [19,48]. Similar to the case of LDEF, a few clusters were observed recurrently at certain points along the orbit and could be dynamically linked to the exhaust dust streams of specific SRM firings [7,34]. The vast majority of detected clusters, however, were non-recurrent and could not be attributed to any specific source.…”

“…[6]). SRMs produce large amounts of solid combustion products in the form of micron-sized aluminium oxide particles, which if used for geostationary orbit (GEO) insertions or retrograde LEO deorbiting manoeuvres, can create circumterrestrial streams of micro-debris with lifetimes of up to months [7,8]. As the use of orbital SRMs ramped up in the late 1970s and 1980s (to enable utilization of the GEO, e.g.…”

“…Some clusters detections during these later missions could be attributed to human spaceflight activities, in particular, to specific firings of solid rocket motors (SRMs) (e.g., Schobert and Paul, 1997). SRMs produce large amounts of solid combustion products in the form of micron-sized aluminium oxide particles, which, if used for geostationary orbit (GEO) insertions or retrograde LEO deorbiting manoeuvres, can create circumterrestrial streams of micro-debris with lifetimes of up to months (Bunte, 2003;Stabroth et al, 2008). As the use of orbital SRMs ramped up in the late 1970s and 1980s (to enable utilization of the GEO, see e.g., McDowel, 1997;Wegener et al, 2004), they gained attention for their potential to cause hazard to spacecraft through their generated micro-debris trails (Mueller and Kessler, 1985;Akiba and Inatani, 1990)-amidst the growing awareness of the space debris problem in general (Kessler and Su, 1985;Kessler, 1991).…”