DUNE-eXpress – Dust astronomy with ConeXpress

Abstract

DUNE-eXpress (DUst measurement near Earth) is a scientific application of the ConeXpress platform developed by Dutch Space [ Scholten, H., Nugteren, P.R., de Kam, J., Cruijssen, H. ConeXpress – low cost access to space, white paper Dutch Space, Leiden, The Netherlands, 2003; Kassebom, M., Mahal, S., Scholten, H., et al. ConeXpress – a low cost satellite solution for GEO applications, DGLR-2003-115, in: Olbert, F. (Ed.), German Aerospace Congress, Munich, Germany, 2003] The goal of this mission is to investigate in situ the physical and dynamical properties of interstellar and interplanetary dust. The Dust Telescope on-board DUNE-eXpress consists of two large area mass analyzer ( LAMA) instrument modules and four dust Trajectory Sensors with a total weight of 60 kg. LAMA measures the chemical composition of individual dust grains whereas the Trajectory Sensor determines their orbital parameters. DUNE-eXpress reaches an orbit outside the geostationary distance in order to avoid interferences with the Earth debris and magnetosphere environment. A position at the Sun–Earth Lagrange points L1 and L2 is well suited and reachable with DUNE-eXpress. A mission scenario based on the SMART 1 mission is presented.