What do shooting stars and astronaut safety have in common?

Both stem from the sub-microscopic rock fragments found throughout the solar system, sometimes called interplanetary dust.

When these particles collide with Earth's atmosphere, they create meteors, better known as shooting stars, as the (usually) microscopic fragments vaporize and leave flaming trails through the air. When they collide with astronauts, they can puncture holes in space suits—or worse. Understanding the sources and patterns of this interplanetary dust is therefore very important to NASA, as it plans for missions to the moon, Mars and beyond.

During its revolutions around the sun, the Parker Solar Probe spacecraft, the mission going closer to the sun than anything in spacefaring history, is bombarded by these dust particles. When crashing onto the spacecraft, the tiny grains—some as small as a ten-thousandth of a millimeter across—vaporize and release a cloud of electrically charged particles that can be detected by FIELDS, a suite of instruments designed to detect electric and magnetic fields.

A pair of papers publishing this week in The Planetary Science Journal use FIELDS data to take an up-close look at the "zodiacal cloud," the collective term for these tiny particles.

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