Spaceborne (inflight) dust impact mass spectrometer for investigation of micrometeoroids elemental composition

The paper presents two possible designs of dust impact mass spectrometer designed to meet the requirements of target size increasing with maintaining the design characteristics at the required level. The problems of modeling the device through the use of numerical electrostatic field in the path of the mass spectrometer calculation, as well as calculations of the trajectories of charged particles are described. For each of the structures the results of modeling the dependency characteristics of the device, such as resolution and collection rate, the place of collision of particles and the target are shown. As results of this modeling the optimal size of the spherical corrector and detector aperture are derived. The description of the experimental stand for dust impact mass spectrometers testing, as well as verifying characteristics obtained from simulation are given.