Breaking News

Preliminary Examinaton
of the
Stardust Interstellar Tray To Begin

Beginning on January 15^th, the first aerogel and aluminum foil samples will be removed from the Stardust Interstellar Tray. This Interstellar Tray Preliminary Examination (ISPE) follows months of planning and review by NASA's advisory Curation and Analysis Planning Team for Extraterrestrial Materials (CAPTEM). The basics of the ISPE plan are given here. For more information please see the 2008 LPSC Abstract by Westphal et al.


ISPE Plan
Optical Examination - About one-third of the 132 aerogel tiles in the Interstellar Tray have been scanned at high magnification for the Stardust@home effort. We have also made low-magnification optical scans of the aluminum foils adjacent to affected aerogel cells using the same photodocumentation techniques used for the cometary tiles.

Tentatively, we will start with candidate interstellar and IDP tracks in tiles 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, & 13-18.

Extraction - Initially, we will conduct practice keystoning on the flight-spare Interstellar Tray, and will extract at least five successful blank keystones and picokeystones.

Next, we will then extract several blanks (at least three) from the flight Interstellar Tray to ensure that keystoning is not a problem on the flight aerogel (we do not expect the interstellar aerogel to behave differently from the cometary aerogel, but need to verify this).

Lastly, we will extract five high-angle tracks (candidate IDPs or secondaries) as regular keystones. These will be mounted on microforks and imaged / documented.

If all proceeding step are successful, we will extract ~10 of the interstellar candidates in picokeystones. We will choose candidates to maximize the diversity in their appearance in the imagery that we have now. It is anticipated that these picokeystones will be mounted in a TEM grid sandwich, that can then be mounted in a variety of ways depending upon the analyses to be performed.

Following picokeystone extractions from the interstellar tiles, we will then remove selected aluminum foils from the front of the Interstellar Tray. We will not remove a foil until all adjacent aerogel cells have been keystoned because of concerns that we might move aerogel during the foil cutting and removal process that could throw off previously documented locations of suspect features in the aerogel.


Anticipated analytical steps
Tracks - Currently, we are planning to do the following analyses on the extracted picokeystones:

• FTIR analysis of these keystones on at the ALS and at the NSLS, primarily to search for organics.

• XRF/XANES/XRD analysis will be made on selected picokeystones. The primary goal here is to see what major elements (except HCNO and Si) are present, and if there is crystalline material.

Additional analyses will be made if it can be demonstrated that there is no risk of damage or contamination to the samples, as determined by the ISPE steering committee.

Foils - Several qualified groups have proposed to make SEM scans of removed aluminum foils, searching for impact craters and potential residue. There is a concern over carbon contamination from cracking organics in SEM vacuum systems that must first be adequately assessed before such analyses will be permitted.
Persons interested in participating in the ISPE should contact the Stardust Curator (michael.e.zolensky@nasa.gov) and Andrew Westphal (westphal@ssl.berkeley.edu).

Cosmic Dust Lab

The 2007 round of sample processing and allocations of Cosmic Dust has been completed. The Cosmic Dust Lab (CDL) will be closed down and cleaned in order to resume work associated with processing of the Interstellar Tray from Stardust.

The Cosmic Dust Curator (Dr. Michael Zolensky) will begin to entertain new request for Cosmic Dust allocations on June 1, 2008. If you are new to the Cosmic Dust program please use the same format that you do for the Stardust sample requests, and send all requests to the Cosmic Dust Curator at:
michael.e.zolensky@nasa.gov

We will transition CDL back to the configuration that permits processing of Cosmic Dust samples beginning July 15, 2008 and conduct Cosmic Dust allocations work in the facility until October 15, 2008.