Sample return of interstellar matter (SARIM)

The scientific community has expressed strong interest to re-fly Stardust-like missions with improved instrumentation. We propose a new mission concept, SARIM, that collects interstellar and interplanetary dust particles and returns them to Earth. SARIM is optimised for the collection and discrimination of interstellar dust grains. Improved active dust collectors on-board allow us to perform in-situ determination of individual dust impacts and their impact location. This will provide important constraints for subsequent laboratory analysis. The SARIM spacecraft will be placed at the L2 libration point of the Sun–Earth system, outside the Earth’s debris belts and inside the solar-wind charging environment. SARIM is three-axes stabilised and collects interstellar grains between July and October when the relative encounter speeds with interstellar dust grains are lowest (4 to 20 km/s). During a 3-year dust collection period several hundred interstellar and several thousand interplanetary grains will be collected by a total sensitive area of 1 m2. At the end of the collection phase seven collector modules are stored and sealed in a MIRKA-type sample return capsule. SARIM will return the capsule containing the stardust to Earth to allow for an extraction and investigation of interstellar samples by latest laboratory technologies

Large area mass analyzer

A new time-of-flight spectrometer for the chemical analysis of cosmic dust particles in space has been simulated by Simion 7.0. The instrument is based upon impact ionization. This method is a reliable method for in-situ dust detection and is well established. Instruments using the impact ionization flew on-board Helios, Galileo and are still in operation on-board Ulysses and Cassini-Huygens missions. he new instrument has a large sensitive area of 0.1m² in order to achieve significant number of measurements. The mass resolution M\Delta M > 100 and the mass range covers the most relevant elements expected in cosmic dust. The instrument has a reflectron configuration which increases the mass resolution. Most of the ions released during the impact are focused to the detector. The ion detector consists of a large area ion-to-electron converter, an electron reflectron and a microchannel plate etector