• DOI:10.1038/362428A0
• Corpus ID: 4315361

Discovery of Jovian dust streams and interstellar grains by the Ulysses spacecraft

@article{Grn1993DiscoveryOJ,
  title={Discovery of Jovian dust streams and interstellar grains by the Ulysses spacecraft},
  author={Eberhard Gr{\"u}n and Herbert A. Zook and Michael Baguhl and Andr{\'e} Balogh and Samuel J. Bame and Hugo Fechtig and Robert J. Forsyth and Mark Manner and Mih{\'a}ly Hor{\'a}nyi and Jochen Kissel and Bertil Anders Lindblad and D. Linkert and G. Linkert and Ingrid Mann and John McDonnell and Gregor Eugen Morfill and John L. Phillips and Carol A. Polanskey and G. Schwehm and N. Siddique and P. Staubach and J. A. Svestka and A. D. Taylor},
  journal={Nature},
  year={1993},
  volume={362},
  pages={428-430}
}

• E. Grün, H. Zook, +20 authors A. Taylor
• Published 1 April 1993
• Physics, Geology
• Nature

ON 8 February 1992, the Ulysses spacecraft flew by Jupiter at a distance of 5.4 AU from the Sun. During the encounter, the spacecraft was deflected into a new orbit, inclined at about 80° to the ecliptic plane, which will ultimately lead Ulysses over the polar regions of the Sun1. Within 1 AU from Jupiter, the onboard dust detector2 recorded periodic bursts of submicrometre dust particles, with durations ranging from several hours to two days, and occurring at approximately monthly intervals (28 ± 3 days). These particles arrived at Ulysses in collimated streams radiating from close to the line-of-sight direction to Jupiter, suggesting a jovian origin for the periodic bursts. Ulysses also detected a flux of micrometre-sized dust particles moving in high-velocity ( =26 km s-1) retrograde orbits (opposite to the motion of the planets); we identify these grains as being of interstellar origin.