Student Dust Counter II: Building the Instrument

The New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt is scheduled for launch in January 2006. As part of the Education and Public Outreach activity of the mission, undergraduate and graduate students at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, University of Colorado, are building a space experiment: the Student Dust Counter (SDC). This talk will summarize the technical details of this experiment. An accompanying poster describes the science goals of SDC. SDC has a high degree of heritage from dust detectors of this type built by the University of Chicago for several missions, including Vega 1 and 2 to comet P/Halley, Cassini and Stardust. Dust detection is based on signals generated by impacts into a thin polyvinylidene-fluoride (PVDF) film.