Dust telescope:: A new tool for dust research.

Dust particles in space carry information about their birth at a remote site in space and time not accessible to direct investigation. When we know where dust particles come from, we can derive from their state and composition important knowledge about the processes by which they were formed. This information can be gained by a combination of trajectory analysis together with the physical and chemical analysis of dust particles. Potential targets of a dust telescope can be interstellar dust phenomena (e.g. local interstellar medium or dusty stellar systems like beta-Pictoris), interplanetary phenomena (e.g. meteor stream dust, cometary, or asteroidal dust, or dust from the moon), or even space debris (e.g. fine grains from solid rocket burns). It is proposed to use a 1 m(2) dust telescope with 50degrees aperture. Such an instrument would detect 5 and 0.5 interplanetary dust grains of 10(-15) g and 10(-12) g per day, respectively. A state-of-the-art dust telescope consists of an array of parallel mounted dust analyzers. Potential components are a high resolution impact mass spectrometer, a dust analyzer for the determination of physical and chemical dust properties, a dust momentum sensor, and a large-area impact detector with trajectory analysis. A first example of such a dust telescope is carried by the proposed Galactic DUNE mission. The goal of DUNE is the analysis of interstellar grains near Earth.