Cosmic Dust News

Mike Zolensky, Interim Cosmic Dust Curator

Volume 7 No. 3 • November 2025

The Cosmic Dust Laboratory had been closed for the latter part of 2024 for lab updates but is now fully back in operation and samples are being processed and allocated as in the past. We have just completed a comprehensive lab cleaning, removing outdated and unnecessary materials from the lab, the first such cleanup in two decades. We also undertook and completed our bi-annual inventory and generated a Cosmic Dust Collection Plan in accordance with NPR 7100.5.

In an effort to facilitate preliminary examination of new cosmic dust grains, we are in the process of installing a new Phenom XL table-top Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) in the Cosmic Dust Curation Lab, which will provide excellent backscattered and secondary electron images and semiquantitative preliminary chemical analyses. Since this SEM will sit within the Cosmic Dust Lab, contamination from the surrounding lab environment during preliminary investigation will be significantly decreased over the similar analyses over the past 45 years, as we will no longer have to carry the samples to the other SEMs in our building, none of which are in clean labs. And since this new SEM instrument can operate in low-vacuum mode we will no longer experience sample charging from the uncoated grains, and thus sample motion and occasional loss during SEM preliminary investigation will also be decreased. As a result, the quality of images in the sample catalog will be greatly enhanced over those we have published in the past from grains that would charge up during observation. These improvements will result in an enhanced sample catalog.

On September 14, 2025, we successfully flew a prototype Cosmic Dust collector on a high-altitude balloon out of the Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility at Fort Sumner, New Mexico, in collaboration with colleagues at the NASA Wallops Flight Facility. The prototype contained three deployable collectors that reused heritage hardware from previous high-altitude aircraft flights with the goal to deploy them at different altitude ranges to sample different populations of dust. The balloon reached a float height of 125,000 ft and was successfully recovered after a short eight-hour test flight.

While the initial flight is not anticipated to have recovered much (if any) cosmic dust, the prototype flight was the first step toward developing more advanced collectors that could be flown on longer duration balloon flights in Antarctica, where atmospheric contaminants are significantly reduced. We still intend to fly collectors on high-altitude aircraft (i.e., WB-57s and ER-2s) whenever possible. Future balloon flights will be in addition to those efforts.