The Marco Polo mission has been selected by the European Space agency as a candidate for launch under their 2015-2025 Cosmic Vision programme. The mission ultimately aims to understand the origins of the planets and even life itself, by returning a sample of material from a primitive asteroid, representative of the early Solar System. The dust on the surface of the asteroid is readily charged and one of the proposed in situ instruments, described here, is an electric field sensor to detect the electrostatic levitation and transport of charged dust particles.
