The unresolved mystery of dust particle swarms within the magnetosphere
Max Sommer

TL;DR
This paper reviews the detection of dust particle swarms in Earth's magnetosphere, proposing electrostatic meteoroid disruption as a natural creation mechanism and highlighting their correlation with geomagnetic activity.
Contribution
It introduces the electrostatic disruption hypothesis for dust swarms and correlates observations from HEOS-2 and GORID with geomagnetic activity, offering a new perspective on natural dust phenomena.
Findings
Dust clusters occur throughout Earth's magnetosphere up to 60,000 km altitude.
A correlation exists between dust clusters and increased geomagnetic activity.
Electrostatic meteoroid disruption is a plausible natural mechanism for swarm formation.
Abstract
Early-generation in-situ dust detectors in near-Earth space have reported the occurrence of clusters of sub-micron dust particles that seemed unrelated to human spaceflight activities. In particular, data from the impact ionization detector onboard the HEOS-2 satellite indicate that such swarms of particles occur throughout the Earth's magnetosphere up to altitudes of 60,000 km -- far beyond regions typically used by spacecraft. Further account of high-altitude clusters has since been given by the GEO-deployed GORID detector, however, explanations for the latter have so far only been sought in GEO spaceflight activity. This perspective piece reviews dust cluster detections in near-Earth space, emphasizing the natural swarm creation mechanism conjectured to explain the HEOS-2 data -- that is, the electrostatic disruption of meteoroids. Highlighting this mechanism offers a novel…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
