Multiple sounding rocket observations of charged dust in the polar winter mesosphere

Abstract

We present data from a winter 2002 sounding rocket campaign for multiple observations of mesospheric charged dust. The campaign consisted of four identically instrumented payloads carrying detectors for charged mesospheric dust particles. The payloads reached an altitude of 100 km in the nighttime mesosphere and were flown from Poker Flat Research Range, Alaska, in conjunction with observations by the UAF sodium and iron resonance lidar system. Three of the four flights flew in sequence during the course of one night to study the temporal evolution of dust layers. Observations show good correlations between structure seen in the charged dust altitude profile, structure seen in the neutral metal layers observed by the lidars, and structure in the plasma density seen by the onboard Langmuir probes. The dust detector is sensitive to positively and negatively charged dust particles with ram energies of 1 to 11 eV for negatively and 3–11 eV for positively charged dust; that is, particles of approximately 5000 amu. The charged dust densities seen (estimated to be approximately 5 to 10 percent of the total dust density) are approximately 100 particles per cc, and the dust is negatively charged. Variations in the dust density of about 10% are seen in conjunction with structure in the plasma density and with the neutral metal layers. In this paper we present the details of the dust data and instrumentation; a companion paper explores the implications of the correlations seen between the dust and other mesospheric layers.