Estimation of impact particles of cosmic dust tracks in Stardust mission (: a preliminary study)

Abstract

Stardust spacecraft of NASA captured cosmic dusts from Comet Wild2, but the particles captured in aerogel were disaggregated into many grains. There were a variety of morphologies of the hypervelosity impact tracks, suggesting a variety of the cosmic dust. We tried to estimate physics of the capture in silica aerogel based on three-dimensional structures of impact tracks obtained from X-ray computed tomography (CT) and XRF.