What is the goal of MXD2?
With MXD2, we want to measure solid dust particles and the surrounding atmosphere around approximately 70 to 110 km height during the noctilucent cloud season. At this height, in the upper mesosphere and lower thermosphere, we have both neutral atmosphere components and charged particles: ions and electrons. The dust particles in the mesosphere can be neutral, positively or negatively charged, and most consist of meteoric smoke particles.

What is meteoric smoke and how is it formed?
Meteoric smoke describes tiny particles that form during the meteor process. Meteors (‘shooting stars’) can be observed when cosmic dust particles burn up in the upper atmosphere. New particles are formed from the cosmic material, and this is meteor smoke.

What are noctilucent clouds?
One may see noctilucent clouds during the summer when looking towards the north after sunset. At a height of 80 to 85 km, they are the highest clouds in the Earth's atmosphere. The clouds that determine the weather are usually below 10 km. In order to be able to see the noctilucent clouds, the sky must be clear from “normal” clouds.

How are the meteoric smoke particles linked to noctilucent clouds?
The noctilucent clouds are made out of ice particles. We suspect that the ice particles form when the water condenses around the meteorite smoke. We want to prove this with our measurements.

What does MXD2 measure?
MXD2 is equipped with instruments that measure neutral gases and electrons, and we have three instruments that measure meteoric smoke and other solid particles that may be present. And we have two dust collector instruments onboard.
For more information about our payloads, please see here.

Why is the payload recovered?
The rocket's payload is recovered when it falls into the sea so we can use the instruments again. And we collect dust samples for analysis. One of the collection devices is the MESS instrument. The collected ice components will vaporize during the flight or later, but other components like the meteoric dust and possibly space debris dust can be analysed.

Will MXD2 measure space debris dust?
We are curious to see whether MXD2 will measure dust from space debris. We simply do not know how much of this tiny space debris dust there is. Space debris is mostly much larger than the tiny dust we are looking for. The smallest space debris particles measured are about one millimetre in size. MXD2 measures particles of several nanometer, one nanometre is a millionth of a millimetre.

Will it be possible to distinguish the space debris dust from meteoric smoke?
One way to distinguish space debris dust from meteoric dust is to look at its composition. Germanium, copper and titanium, for example, are chemical elements that rarely occur in meteoric dust but are frequently found in space debris. If we collect a sufficiently large amount of dust, we can measure its composition and find this out. The size and spatial distribution that we measure with the in situ instruments could also provide us with some clues on the space debris dust. 

Can we find out the effect that space debris dust has in the mesosphere?
In our research project, we investigate the processes by which small solid dust particles at this altitude generally interact with electrons, ions and neutral particles. Space debris dust may influence the surrounding atmosphere in the same way as other dust particles for instance when it collects free electrons or when it triggers the growth of ice particles.

What does MXD2 study aside from the noctilucent clouds?
We investigate the basic physics of interactions of solid particles in a partially ionized gas, this is called dusty plasma and shows phenomena that are caused by collective effects between dust, electrons and ions. 

Are their other instruments involved in the campaign?
During the campaign other instruments measure the space that the rocket passes from the ground, and among those are instruments at the ALOMAR observatory on Andøya and the EISCAT VHF radar near Tromsø.

When will MXD2 be launched?
Ideally, the sky should be clear and the noctilucent clouds should be directly observable with a lidar, an optical instrument that illuminates the ice particles with a laser.The ice clouds are also observed by radar when they reflect radio waves under certain conditions. For the launch we would ideally have both a radar and a lidar signal.