Abstract:
The velocity and charge information of cosmic dust particles can be obtained by dust trajectory sensor (DTS) based on the multi-layer metal wire grids, which is of great significance for determining the origin of dust particles and revealing the interactions between charged dust particles and interplanetary space environment. In this paper, the method of extracting information of cosmic dust particle velocity and charge from the detected signals by DTS was studied, and the factors affecting the detection precision were simulated and analyzed. The results indicate that, the detection error of dust charge and velocity increases with the increasing dust particle velocity, and decreases with the increasing charge to noise ratio (QNR) of the detector, while are independent of the impact of dust particle incidence angle and dust particle charge. When the QNR is larger than 10, the detection precision of charge, velocity and motion direction for dust particles are better than 1.5%, 0.8% and 0.6°, respectively. The simulation can be used as a reference for DTS design and its follow-up space applications.