Dust Accelerator Lab

University of Colorado

A technical tour is being arranged for Tuesday afternoon April 28, 2015.

 ‌

The Institute for Modeling Plasma, Atmospheres, and Cosmic Dust (IMPACT) houses a 3 MV linear electrostatic dust accelerator which is used for a variety of impact research activities as well as calibrating dust instruments for space applications. The dust accelerator is equipped with a 3 MV Pelletron generator capable of accelerating micron and submicron particles of various materials to velocities approaching 100 km/s. The figure below illustrates the operation principle: the dust source is mounted onto the HV terminal of the Pelletron and individual charged dust particles are accelerated by the electrostatic field. A pair of pickup tube detectors is used to measure the velocity of each particle and the logic circuit of the Particle Selection Unit (PSU) selects the particles within a desired range of velocity and charge. The rest of the particles are deflected and do not reach the experimental chamber. read more...