Introduction: Design of an effective dust mitigation system to support NASA’s new initiative to return to the surface of the Moon must be a high priority [1,2]. A number of strategies have been proposed based on brushing, magnetic susceptibility or magnetic attraction, variable EMF or other surfaces, and particle guns for charging or repelling dust [2]. Brushing was demonstrated to be effective...

The presence of solid, micro-impurtities in tokamak plasmas has become a topic of great importance. Dust, originating from the reactor wall surfaces as a result plasma surface interactions, has the potential to cause serious safety hazards and confinement issues and therefore the transport of these particle contaminants in the plasma of an operational tokamak is therefore, a matter of great imp...

The role of hot electrons in charging dust grains is investigated a two-temperature hydrogen plasma. A variety particles are introduced into the system and secondary electron emission (SEE) from each has been reported. cylindrical Langmuir probe used for determining plasma parameters Faraday cup connected to an electrometer order measure current. readings confirm SEE observed tungsten low-press...

The dust grains were observed over a thousand discharges in the tokamak COMPASS. A novel method for semi-automatic extraction and tracking of dust grains using a relatively low frame-rate camera (370 fps) was proposed. Radiation lifetime, time evolution and the acceleration of the dust grains were studied. The measured dust velocities roughly correspond to a simple model. However, slow dust par...

Silicate dust grains in the interstellar medium are known to be mostly amorphous, yet crystalline silicate grains have been observed in many long-period comets and in protoplanetary disks. Annealing of amorphous silicate grains into crystalline grains requires temperatures > ∼ 1000K, but exposure of dust grains in comets to such high temperatures is incompatible with the generally low temperatu...

Composition of the Comet dust obtained by the dust impact analyzer on the Halley probes indicated that the comet dust is a mixture of silicate and carbonaceous material. The collected interplanetary dust particles (IDP’s) are fluffy and composite, having grains of several different types stuck together. Using Discrete Dipole Approximation (DDA) we study the scattering properties of composite gr...

The Moon and Mars represent intriguing and divergent case studies where natural electrical processes may occur in environments beyond our more familiar terrestrial experience. The windy, Aeolian environment of Mars likely produces substantial electrical activity via the tribo-electrification of individual dust grains that occurs during atmospheric disturbances. While there may be some analogies...

We study the dynamics of large, charged dust grains in turbulent giant molecular clouds (GMCs). Massive dust grains behave as aerodynamic particles in primarily neutral dense gas, and thus are able to produce dramatic small-scale fluctuations in the dust-to-gas ratio. Hopkins & Lee (2016) directly simulated the dynamics of neutral dust grains in super-sonic MHD turbulence, typical of GMCs, and ...

Introduction: Mars is a planet of many apparent dichotomies in topography, atmospheric evolution , hydrology, and geomagnetism. We describe yet another set of extremes in the area of atmospheric chemistry. While solar photons in fair-weather are a known and well-studied driver of Martian chemistry, there is increasing evidence that electro-chemistry unique to dust storms may be a second new dri...