Comparison of Solitary Waves and Dust Impact Signals Detected by Electric Field Instruments Onboard MAVEN Spacecraft
Abstrakt
Electric field instruments are capable of detecting dust impacts in different space environments as transient pulses. Using data from Mars Atmosphere and Volatile
Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft, we present a preliminary statistical analysis over the year 2015, around 360 000 waveforms. These pulses are detected by electric field instruments in the dipole (potential drop between probes) or monopole (spacecraft to probe potential measurement) configuration. We find a total of 16 000 events, which can be interpreted as dust impacts and solitary waves by a simple automatic code. To reliably distinguish solitary waves from dust impact signals by an automatic code is a very challenging task.
We have used two parameters to efficiently separate solitary waves from dust impacts: the ratio of rising and decay time, the ratio of amplitudes. Our preliminary results show that this approach could be efficient to significantly reduce data misinterpretation.