Static electricity may transport dust across airless planetary bodies
Friday, July 1, 2016 - 07:21
in Astronomy & Space
A NASA-funded research team, led by Mihaly Horanyi at the University of Colorado-Boulder (CU-Bolder), has conducted laboratory experiments to bring closure to a long-standing issue of electrostatic dust transport, explaining a variety of unusual phenomena on the surfaces of airless planetary bodies, including observations from the Apollo era to the recent Rosetta comet mission. The research being done at the Institute for Modeling Plasma, Atmospheres and Cosmic Dust (IMPACT) was recently published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, and explains how dust may be transporting across vast regions above the lunar surface and rings of Saturn, without winds or flowing water.