Nominator's project description
| Professor Horanyi is the world's leading researcher in cosmic dust physics. In many theory publications he has investigated the important role that dust plays in astrophysical environments - in Comets, Saturn's rings, Jupiter's Zodiacal Cloud, Star and Planet formation and the Earth's environment. In recent years, he has branched out into experimental physics as well. In 1992 he established a dusty plasma research laboratory, where some of the most basic problems in dusty plasma physics could be addressed (for example, dust charging due to electron and ion collection in a thermal plasma, electron beams, and UV fluxes). The laboratory experiments also resulted in hardware development for rockets to investigate these processes in the mesosphere, where small (nano) dust particles could be responsible for the formation of Noctilucent clouds (an important issue in environmental research). Another outgrowth from this laboratory work (in combination with previous involvement as a co-investigator for dust instruments on the Galileo and Cassini space missions) is the development of space flight hardware for dust detection. The New Horizons Mission to Pluto is carrying instrument action from his group - the Student Dust Counter which maps out the dust distribution across the solar system. This is the first student experiment on a NASA deep space mission. Another instrument, the Cosmic Dust Experiment (CDE) will be launched in April this year, to monitor the dust influx into the Earth's atmosphere. |
Publications (partial selection)
| 2008 | Mihaly Horanyi,
Antal Juhasz,
Gregor Morfill: Large-scale structure of Saturn's E ring. In: Geophysical Research Letters, 2008, L04203 |
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| 2007 | Xu Wang,
M. Horanyi, Z. Sternovsky, S. Robertson, G. E. Morfill: A laboratory model of the lunar surface potential
near lit-dark boundaries. In: Geophysical Research Letters, 2007, L16104, |
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| 2007 | Antal Juhasz,
Mihaly Horanyi,
Gregor Morfill: Signatures of Enceladus in Saturn's E-ring. In: Geophysical Research Letters, 2007, L09104 |
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