UCB Dust Counter Beats Space Distance Record

A dust counter that was developed at the University of Colorado in Boulder (UCB) has reached an impressive record, when it became the most distant working instrument of its kind from Earth.

The tool is installed on the NASA New Horizons space prove, which is currently more than halfway on its trip to reach the distant dwarf planet Pluto.

On October 10, the Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter (SDC) reached a distance of 1.67 billion miles from Earth, making it the most distant, still-operational dust counter in existence.

At this point, there is no reason to believe that the instrument will not keep operating until the spacecraft reaches its destination. All systems on New Horizons are currently working fine.

The probe, which was launched back in 2006, is now located around the orbit of Uranus. The dust counter it carries was developed by a team at the UCB Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics.

“The New Horizons mission is going to break a lot of records, but this early one is one of the sweetest,” explains the principal investigator of the mission, Alan Stern.

“We’re very proud to be collecting solar system dust data farther out than any mission ever has, and we’re even prouder to be carrying the first student-built and student-operated science instrument ever sent on a planetary space mission,” he adds.

“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience to be part of the group of students who made this happen. We built a record-breaking, successful instrument that is taking scientific measurements to advance our understanding of the role of dust in our solar system,” says Andrew Poppe.

He is a graduate student in physics who was a part of the LASP team that operated the SDC, and analyzed the data the instrument beamed back to Earth.

The expert explains that this instrument could reveal a large number of very interesting aspects about the early solar system, given that the dust particles it analyzes where formed shortly after the Sun.

Dust measurements collected thus far are reported to be in tune with information collected in the past by the NASA Galileo and Ulysses missions, which were conducted at Jupiter.

“The SDC was built and tested to the same NASA engineering standards as professionally built flight instruments, under the supervision of professionals,” explains Mihali Horanyi.

“Students participating in the SDC project have come from a variety of disciplines ranging from science and engineering to journalism and business, and many have graduated and gone on to careers in the space industry,” he adds.

Horanyi is the principal investigator of the SDC instrument, and he also holds an appointment as a research scientist at the LASP, Space Fellowship reports.