Elemental Compositions of Comet 81P/Wild 2 Samples Collected by Stardust

Abstract

NASA's Stardust spacecraft collected dust particles from Comet 81P/Wild 2, at an encounter speed of ~6.1 km/s, into low-density, silica aerogel capture cells and in impact craters in the Al-

Microstructural Indications for Protoenstatite Precursor of Cometary MgSiO 3 Pyroxene: A Further High-Temperature Component of Comet Wild 2

“…Investigation on several tracks of the Stardust mission material (Zolensky et al 2006;Brownlee et al 2006;Flynn et al 2006) have shown that contrary to all expectations most of the impacted mineral grains are high-temperature mineral phases like crystalline forsteritic olivine, crystalline low-calcium pyroxenes, and calcium-aluminum-rich inclusions (CAIs). For example, CAIs are believed to be formed in the solar nebula by high-temperature processes of precondensed material, including evaporation, condensation, and melting (Amelin et al 2002 and references therein).…”

Nanoscale infrared spectroscopy as a non-destructive probe of extraterrestrial samples

“…However, use of this technique for studying sub-micron scale heterogeneity characteristic of natural samples or individual micron-sized samples such as the cometary dust grains retrieved by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)'s Stardust mission [1][2][3][4][5][6] is severely hampered by the spatial resolution afforded by the diffraction limit and the wavelength of IR light 7,8 . This limitation rules out direct investigations of both sub-micron samples and sub-micron inclusions in larger heterogeneous samples by conventional Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) [9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16] .…”

Analytical methods for discriminating stardust in aerogel capture media

“…The track lengths vary from approximately 0.3 to 3.3 mm and from conical, "carrot" shapes to more bulbous shapes. Details of the tracks can be found in the supplemental online material of [5] and in [11].…”