Performance of micro-balances for dust flux measurement Original Research Article

Micro-balances have been used in the past for volatile deposition monitoring in laboratory and in space environment. In order to determine their suitability to measure mass deposition in the form of solid particles, some topical aspects must be characterised, such as the sensitivity versus temperature and grain mass and the sticking efficiency versus grain speed. These parameters have been retrieved for different sensor configurations, i.e. with and without an adhesive coating, used in the perspective of improving the sensor particle collection efficiency. Our studies show that the adhesive coating improves the sensor sticking efficiency only for fast (100–400 m s−1) grains. However, the stability of the output signal with temperature is worse in the coated configuration by a factor of about ten. These results provide important inputs in the view of using micro-balances for dust monitoring. In particular, they have been carefully considered for the selection of the configuration of micro-balances, included as sub-systems of the GIADA experiment onboard the ESA ROSETTA mission and aimed at studying flux and dynamic properties of cometary grains.