Helios Dust Instrumentation

The Helios 1 and 2 spacecraft each carried two dust instruments to characterize the Zodiacal dust cloud inside the Earth’s orbit down to spacecraft positions 0.3 AU from the sun. The Zodiacal light instrument measured the brightness of light scattered by interplanetary dust along the line of sight. The in situ Micrometeoroid analyzer recorded impacts of meteoroids onto the sensitive detector surface and characterized their composition. The instruments delivered radial profiles of their measured data. Comet or meteoroid streams, and even interstellar dust were identified in the data.