DARTS/TANPOPO at ISAS/JAXA

Tanpopo Instruments

There are 2 types of panels used for the Tanpopo experiments: Exposure Panel (EP) and Capture Panel (CP). The archived data released at DARTS are taken by CPs.

The Capture Panels

The Capture Panels (CPs), each of which contained one or two blocks of amorphous silica aerogel, were exposed to collect hypervelocity impact microparticles (Tabata et al. 2016).

Side view, top view, and cross section of CP Type-1 (A) and side view and top view of CP Type-2 (B). The pink part is the lid; the dark pink part is the body; the light blue part is the aerogel 0.01?g/cm3; the blue part is the aerogel 0.03?g/cm3; and the dark blue part is the carbon nanotube forest for monitoring the degree of contamination. (Yamagishi et al. 2021)

The aerogel blocks and the identified tracks were observed and processed with the CLOXS (Captured particles Locating, Observation and eXtraction System, Sasaki et al. 2019), originally developed by the Tanpopo team for initial analysis, and the generated data are archived in a unified database.

Operation

They remained in place for about 1 year and were then returned to the ground laboratory. Each year, a group of CPs containing from 11 to 12 aerogel blocks was attached to the three pointing faces of the ExHAM* :

S: Space face pointing to zenith (anti-Earth)
E: East face pointing to the ram direction
N: North face pointing to the port side away from the JEM module

This process was repeated three times in total during 2015?2018. Additional exposure of one CP that faced the ram direction was conducted between 2018 and 2019.

* ... The ExHAM is a multipurpose exposure platform that can be attached to an external handrail of the JEM-EF of the ISS which is under the Earth-gravity gradient, three-axis attitude control. About ExHAM at JAXA (in Japanese)