Fachbereich 14 - Geowissenschaften
Institut für Planetologie
Experimentelle Weltraumforschung

The Cometary and Interstellar Dust Analyzer CIDA for the CONTOUR and
Stardut Missions and COSIMA for the Rosetta Mission

The CIDA and COSIMA instruments analyze the composition of individual grains in the cometary coma. In CIDA, as each particle impacts a silver plate, the high impact energy due to the relative velocity of the spacecraft as it flies through the coma causes the elements and molecular compounds in the particle to become ionized. In the COSIMA case with slow relative velocities, ionization of sample material - samples are collected on specially selected sampling surfaces - is performed by a primary ion (PI) beam. Using in both cases a fast time-of-flight mass spectrometer, a complete set of ions are detected for each impact or PI-pulse, from a mass range of 1 (atomic hydrogen) up to a few thousand atomic mass units, encompassing all elements in the periodic table and many molecules, such as organic compounds. The two sister instruments are flying on the Stardust mission, which will encounter comet Wild 2 in January of 2004, and were also on CONTOUR mission which will encounter two comets, Encke in November of 2003, and Schwassmann-Wachmann III in June of 2006. The CONTOUR start, however, failed. COSIMA is part of the orbiter payload onboard the Rosetta mission that, after a delay in January, probably will start in 2004. The data returned will give clues to the elemental and chemical composition of the dust from these comets.

Beteiligte Wissenschaftler:

Elmar K. Jessberger, Thomas Stephan et al.

Veröffentlichungen:

J. Kissel, A. Glasmachers, E. Grün, Henkel, H. Höfner, G. Haerendel, H. von Hoerner, K. Hornung, E.K. Jessberger, F.R. Krueger, D. Möhlmann, J.M. Greenberg, Y. Langevin, J. Silen, D. Brownlee, B.C. Clark, M.S. Hanner, F. Hoerz, S. Sandford, Z. Sekanina, P.Tsou, N.G. Utterback, M. Zolensky, and Ch. Heiss (2002): The Cometary and Interstellar Dust Analyzer (CIDA) for the CONTOUR and Stardust Missions. ESA-SP (im Druck).

Kissel J., Höfner H., Haerendel G., Pappriger P., Czempiel S., Eibl J., Henkel H., Glasmachers A., Torkar K., Rüdenauer F., Krueger F.R., Jessberger E.K., Grün E., Utterback N.G., Thomas R., Langevin Y., von Hoerner H., Silen J., Hornung K., and the COSIMA Team (2002): COSIMA, a high resolution time of flight spectrometer for secondary ion mass spectrometry of cometary dust. ESA-SP (im Druck).