Layered structures in extended dust clouds under microgravity

Ordering of dust particles in dusty plasmas under microgravity.

Structure formation of dust particles in dusty plasmas under microgravity has been simulated by the molecular dynamics method. It is shown that, at low temperatures, dust particles are organized into layered spherical shells. The number of shells is a function of the system size and the strength of screening by ambient plasma particles, while the dependency on the latter is much weaker. In the ...

Microgravity studies of aggregation in particulate clouds

Layered Point Clouds

We present a simple point-based multiresolution structure for interactive visualization of very large point sampled models on consumer graphics platforms. The structure is based on a hierarchy of precomputed object-space point clouds. At rendering time, the clouds are combined coarse-to-fine with a top-down structure traversal to locally adapt sample densities according to the projected size in...

Frequency clustering in self-excited dust density waves under microgravity conditions

Nonviscous motion of a slow particle in a dust crystal under microgravity conditions.

Subsonic motion of a large particle moving through the bulk of a dust crystal formed by negatively charged small particles is investigated using the PK-3 Plus laboratory onboard the International Space Station. Tracing the particle trajectories shows that the large particle moves almost freely through the bulk of the plasma crystal, while dust particles move along characteristic α-shaped pathwa...