Experimental Studies on the Aggregation Properties of Ice and Dust in Planet-Forming Regions

To reveal the formation of planetesimals it is of great importance to understand the collision behavior of the dusty and icy aggregates they have formed from. We present an experimental setup to investigate the aggregation properties in low-velocity collisions of dust aggregates, solid ices and icy aggregates under microgravity conditions. Results from ESA’s 45th Parabolic Flight Campaign show that most collisions in the velocity range 0.1 m/s < v_c < 0.5m/s are dominated by a rebound behavior of the projectile dust aggregates and only ~ 5% of the translational kinetic energy is conserved after the encounters.