New results from in situ measurements of Cosmic Dust — Data from the GORID experiment

Abstract

The impact detector GORID, on the Russian Express II satellite has now collected data on Cosmic Dust and Space Debris for more than one year from its geostationary location at 80° East. During this time a large number of events have been registered and these are now being analysed and categorised. Dust and Debris particles are in the first approximation separated by evaluating the velocity, assuming that particles in Earth orbit are related to Space Debris and that particles with velocities above the Earth escape velocity are Cosmic Dust particles. Now that a full year of data collected with constant instrument settings is available proper analysis is possible where the random process of the impacts best can be described by statistical methods on the whole set of data. Data sets from one or several full years are required to suppress the possible biases that can result from spatial, temporal and directional variations in the flux and to reduce the statistical errors. Interesting observations include clusters of particles and indications of highly charged particles.