Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics
Scientific paper
Dec 2010
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2010agufmed13b..05w&link_type=abstract
American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2010, abstract #ED13B-05
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
[0800] Education, [1920] Informatics / Emerging Informatics Technologies, [2129] Interplanetary Physics / Interplanetary Dust, [7594] Solar Physics, Astrophysics, And Astronomy / Instruments And Techniques
Scientific paper
The Stardust Discovery mission returned two unprecedented extraterrestrial samples to terrestrial laboratories: the first samples from a known planetary body beyond the Moon, the Jupiter-family comet 81P/Wild2, and the first sample of contemporary interstellar dust. The Stardust Interstellar Dust Collector is a 0.1m2 array of aerogel and aluminum foil that was exposed to the interstellar dust stream during the cruise phase of the Stardust mission for 200 days before the cometary encounter. Several dozen contemporary interstellar dust particles are expected to have been captured in aerogel and aluminum foil collectors. We will report on the discovery of three tracks in the aerogel collectors of the Stardust Interstellar Dust Collector that are consistent with an origin from the interstellar dust stream[2]. These tracks were originally identified not by professional researchers, but by volunteers participating in a massively distributed search called Stardust@home. More than 29,000 volunteers have participated in Stardust@home, and have collectively done more than 75,000,000 searches of digital imagery of the Stardust Interstellar Dust Collector. The volunteers have so far identified 51 tracks, most of which are due to secondary ejecta of micrometeoroid impacts on the spacecraft solar panels. Using calibration images in the datastream, we quantitatively measure the detection efficiency and false positives (the equivalent of noise rates in electronic detectors) of individual "dusters" as well as the entire ensemble of volunteers. We find that the detection efficiency and specificity (the complement of the rate of false positives) of the ensemble of dusters is high. We will report on the results of phase III of Stardust@home, which employs new calibration data for training and measurement of detection efficiency and noise rates [1], and uses optical imagery collected from aerogel tiles extracted from the collector tray. The new imagery is superior to the imagery searched during Phases I and II. We will also briefly describe the challenging extractions of these candidates from the collectors, and the subsequent synchrotron-based x-ray microprobe analyses. References [1] Westphal A. J. et al. 2009. Meteoritics & Planetary Science Suppl. 44:A217. [2] Westphal A. J. et al. 2010. Proc. 73rd Meteoritical Society, #5302
Butterworth Anna
Dusters M.
Frank Denis
Hudson Benoît
ISPE Team
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