Cosmic Dust News
Marc Fries, Cosmic Dust Curator
Volume 4 No. 2 • September 2022
2020 Geminids Timed Collection
Particles from the 2020 Timed Collection of the Geminid meteor shower are announced as available for request. Six particles identified as Cosmic are included in the catalog for this collection. The parent body for the Geminid shower is "rock comet" 3200 Phaethon, the target for the upcoming JAXA Destiny+ flyby mission. Particles from this collection may originate from 3200 Phaethon or may be constituents of the sporadic IDP background - Cosmic Dust cannot differentiate between these possibilities using standard preliminary examination analyses. Consortium studies are encouraged for these particles. This catalog is presented as an initial release with possible announcement of additional particles in a subsequent Newsletter. There is an additional set of collectors from this timed collection that have not been fully processed and may contain additional particles. When the collection occurred, we shipped two sets of collectors for use, one intended for collection and a second contingency set. It was recently discovered that the collectors were changed out between the two collection flights, and the contingency collectors could also contain particles. These particles will be processed, and the catalog updated as soon as possible, so stay tuned to future issues of this newsletter for more material from this timed collection.
Aircraft Collected Particle (ACP) Collection for 2022
The collectors have returned to JSC from 2022 high altitude flights for the Aircraft Collected Particle (ACP) collection. Two collectors were flown on ER-2 flights - one "dry" collector testing methods for dust collection and one oil-coated collector to act as a control sample. The "dry" collector included a fluorinated polymer foam to test its resistance to UV degradation, as well as a honeycomb mesh collector. The collectors will be examined this week. All particles removed will be examined with standard Cosmic Dust preliminary examination techniques and announced in a future newsletter. These collectors were exposed during and after a meteor outburst of the annual Tau Herculid shower arising from a recent fragmentation of the 73/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 comet.
SPWW and SPA Collections
The South Pole Water Well (SPWW) micrometeorite collection and the South Pole Air (SPA) filtered IDP collection should be announced as available for requests in the Spring 2023 Astromaterials Newsletter. We are nearing the final stages of setting up the database for these new collections, and we look forward to making them available to the scientific community in the next issue of this newsletter.
Tech Updates
New microscopes are now in operation for Cosmic Dust processing. Thanks are due to Ron Bastien and Roland Montes for fabricating a mount for the Large Area Collector (LAC) examination bench to accommodate the new microscope.