Ulysses principal investigator honoured
13 December 2000
Eberhard T. Gr|n, principal investigator for the Ulysses DUST experiment, has been elected a fellow of the American Geophysical Union for his work with dust detectors on several interplanetary missions. Using results gathered by the Ulysses DUST detector, Gr|n and his colleagues at the Max-Planck-Institut f|r Kernphysik in Heidelberg, Germany, were the first to identify interstellar dust deep within the solar system.Gr|n says: "In 1977, when we wrote our proposal for the Ulysses DUST experiment, it was commonly held that interstellar dust grains are swept away from the planetary system by the magnetic field carried by the solar wind. The surprise came after the Jupiter fly-by when we realised that the stream of dust particles recorded by our instrument had arrived from the opposite direction to interplanetary dust. It took us only a short time to confirm that most of the dust Ulysses recorded beyond the asteroid belt was truly interstellar in origin. A whole new area of study has started from a few bits of information that Ulysses transmitted to ground in 1992."
Other AGU Fellows on the Ulysses science team include Johannes Geiss, Len Fisk, Jack Gosling, George Gloeckler, Lou Lanzerotti, Dave McComas, Marcia Neugebauer, Randy Jokipii and the JPL Project Scientist, Ed Smith.
Last Update: 1 September 2019
