#MIDAS and its first #dust grain
▻http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/2014/12/17/midas-and-its-first-dust-grain
This blog post is contributed by Mark Bentley, MIDAS Principal Investigator at the Space Research Institute (IWF) in Graz, Austria. One of the big challenges in planning MIDAS operations is predicting the amount of dust that we collect during an exposure. Measuring the rate of dust grains flying past #Rosetta and their size distribution is, of course, part of our #Science, but to plan our operations, we need to have some idea of what to expect beforehand! This is particularly complicated because with MIDAS, we are interested in measuring the smallest cometary dust particles, less than 1 µm (micrometre or millionth of a metre) in size, and ground-based telescope observations that are used to study dust remotely are almost blind to these sizes. So with that in mind, we started our first (...)