Investigation of lunar ejecta dynamics: particles reaching the near-Earth space and their effect on Earth-based observation

¹ School of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Shenzhen Campus of Sun Yat-sen University, 518107 Shenzhen, China
² State Key Laboratory of Astronautic Dynamics, Xi’an Satellite Control Centre, 710043 Xi’an, China
³ Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Intelligent Microsatellite Constellation, Shenzhen Campus of Sun Yat-sen University, 518107 Shenzhen, China

^★ Corresponding author; liuxd36@mail.sysu.edu.cn

Received: 22 November 2023
Accepted: 13 November 2024

Abstract

Aims. Particles ejected from the lunar surface via hypervelocity impacts form a torus between the Earth and the Moon. According to our previous study, about 2.3 × 10⁻⁴ kg/s particles impact the Earth after long-term orbital evolution. We mainly focus on these Earth impactors, analyze their orbital element distribution, and estimate their influence on Earth-based observations.

Methods. In previous work we simulated the long-term orbital evolution of particles ejected from the lunar surface, and obtained their steady-state spatial distribution in the Earth–Moon system. For this work we analyzed the simulation results for the Earth impactors, including the fraction of impactors with different initial parameters among all impactors, the orbital element distribution, and the projection of particles onto several Earth-based observatories.

Results. Particles ejected from the lunar surface are more likely to impact the Earth within a certain range of initial parameters. Most of these lunar-ejected impactors (~70%) reach the Earth within one year, while most of the small ones (87.2% of 0.2 μm particles and 64.6% of 0.5 μm particles) reach the Earth within one week. A large proportion of lunar-ejected Earth impactors can be distinguished from interplanetary dust particles according to the differences in their orbital distributions. In addition, lunar-ejected particles may exhibit distinct configurations and orientations from the perspectives of different Earth-based observatories.