Electrostatic Regolith Interaction Experiment (ERIE) Electrometer Initial Flight Results

The Electrostatic Regolith Interaction Experiment (ERIE) is a suborbital flight payload studying electrostatically charged dust particle dynamics under microgravity, jointly developed by University of Central Florida (UCF) and NASA Kennedy Space Center (KSC). ERIE combines components from two systems, the COLLisions Into Dust Experiment (COLLIDE) from UCF and the Wheel Electrostatic Spectrometer (WES) from NASA KSC, to advance understanding of charged grain behavior on low gravity bodies such as the Moon and asteroids.

ERIE slides a door containing an electrometer system monitoring various insulating disks across the surface of a regolith simulant bed. The experiment is activated when the payload enters the microgravity potion of the flight. The grains in the simulant bed tribocharge via agitation during launch as well as through frictional interactions with the door and its protruding insulators. As the retention door retracts, particles are allowed to loft into an open volume, achieving motion due to electrostatic repulsion. The electrometer system measures the charge transfer between the granular material and the insulators. As the charged grains exit the bed, they travel through an applied electric field and a camera observes the kinematics of the individual grains whose trajectories are determined by their net charges.

The design of the ERIE electrometer instrument and initial results from the first flight was presented at the 2021 AGU Fall Meeting under P55E-2002. Shortly after microgravity was achieved and the retaining door began to open, the rate of charge acquisition measured by the electrometer increased, indicating the insulators were accumulating triboelectric charge. Charged grains were observed in the video data to traverse across the external electric field and become deflected from a linear path due to their charges. Pairs of grains were also observed to orbit one another as expected from two oppositely charged bodies in proximity to one another. Improvements to the design of the instrument and preliminary results obtained from the second flight scheduled for Q3 2022 will be presented at this meeting.