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Observations Of Triboelectric Charging Effects On Langmuir-Type Probes In Dusty Plasma, Aroh Barjatya, C. M. Swenson

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Investigation of Earth’s mesosphere using sounding rockets equipped with a myriad of instruments has been a highly active field in the last 2 decades. This paper presents data from three separate instruments: an RF impedance probe, a DC fixed bias Langmuir probe, and an electric field probe, that were flown on a mesospheric sounding rocket flight investigating the presence of charged dust within and/or around a sporadic metal layer. The combined data set indicates a case of payload surface charging, the causes of which are investigated within this paper. A generic circuit model is developed to analyze payload charging and …