31 Oct 2016

PSI Senior Scientist Henry Throop spent a week in October 2016 performing experiments at the University of Colorado’s Institute for Modeling Plasma, Atmospheres and Cosmic Dust (IMPACT). Throop, shown here with his co-investigator Dr. Dan Durda of Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), was using the lab to probe the origins of Jupiter’s dusty rings. “We think that the dust in Jupiter’s rings is made when really fast dust grains from space hit Jupiter’s small moons. But it’s hard to understand the physics directly because we can’t go on a moon and watch it happen. But in this laboratory chamber [behind Throop], we can accelerate dust grains, and watch how they smash meteorites apart into tiny bits. It’s the same as is happening at Jupiter.”
This work is funded a by a grant to Throop from NASA’s Outer Planets Research program, entitled “Hypervelocity Impacts and the origins of Dusty Rings.”