Abstract: 

Interplanetary dust particles (IDPs) are small particles ranging from nanometers to centimeters that are present throughout the solar system. IDPs are produced by several processes such as cometary outgassing, asteroidal collisions, and grain-grain mutual collisions. As IDPs orbit the Sun, they impact all planetary bodies and contribute to several important processes, including contamination of planetary atmospheres with metallic atoms, erosion and weathering of planetary surfaces, and chemical modification of the solar wind. IDPs are also a natural hazard to all robotic and human spacecraft and/or landed assets (e.g., on the lunar surface).
In this talk, I describe the fundamentals of the distribution of IDPs in the solar system (also known as the “zodiacal cloud”) and touch on both remote-sensing and in-situ observations. I also compare models and constraints on our solar system’s zodiacal cloud to those observed around other stars–so called “exozodiacal clouds”. This comparison helps to place our solar system in context with other star systems and in doing so, may point to evidence of our solar system’s particularly violent youth.

Bio:

Dr. Andrew Poppe is an Associate Research Scientist at the Space Sciences Laboratory (SSL) at the Univ. California, Berkeley. He received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Colorado, Boulder in 2011. He was a postdoc at SSL from 2011-2013 and was hired as a research scientist at SSL in 2013. His primary research expertise lies in both space plasma interactions with planetary bodies such as the Moon, Mercury, and the moons of the giant planets, as well as in the origins, dynamics, and planetary impacts of interplanetary dust grains. He currently serves as the Deputy PI for NASA’s ARTEMIS heliophysics mission at the Moon, as well as the Heliophysics Science Lead for NASA’s New Horizons mission, currently in the outer heliosphere. When not working on science, he is an avid road cyclist, hiker, gardener, and reader of science fiction.
Recommended readings: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ab322a
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11214-019-0597-7 Sections 1, 2, 5, and 6