The Orbital Distributions of Interplanetary Dust Revised

The distribution of orbits of interplanetary dust particles is revised. Infrared observations of the zodiacal cloud by the COBE DIRBE instrument, flux measurements by the dust detectors on board Galileo and Ulysses spacecraft, meteor orbit database acquired by the AMOR radar and the crater size distributions on lunar rock samples retrieved by the Apollo missions are fused into a single model. The main results are: the inclination distribution is unexpectedly wide, suggesting dominance of cometary particles in the flux on Earth; the average impact speed of meteoroids onto the lunar rocks is two times higher than it was previously thought; asteroidal dust was not necessary in explaining all the observations, however, there is ambiguity in interpreting the observations at low ecliptic latitudes where a fraction of dust particles may originate from asteroids.