Mini missions are being launched amid the spires – a haven for dust particles that may contain clues about the cosmos and the early Earth
n the roof of Canterbury Cathedral, two planetary scientists are searching for cosmic dust. While the red brick parapet hides the streets, buildings and trees far below, only wispy clouds block the deep blue sky that extends into outer space.
“You have to be a bit of a detective,” says Van Ginneken. The extreme heating on atmospheric entry changes many of the minerals and “you have to figure out the nature of the original particle based on the limited information you have”.Researchers are turning to micrometeorites for clues about the chemistry of asteroids and meteorites.
“If you can get an understanding as to how many dust particles are arriving over the surface, you can make some estimates as to how much material is arriving at the Earth over time, and therefore, potentially, what contribution space dust is making to the chemistry on the Earth,” says Wozniakiewicz. Wozniakiewicz and Van Ginneken are looking for a specific type of extraterrestrial dust: cosmic spherols. These tiny spheres are relatively easy to identify compared with other dust, because of their distinctive shape, but it takes a microscope to be certain that a cosmic spherol did not come from Earth. This makes them useful in estimating how much cosmic dust fell in a particular place over a given time period.
Larsen “started the whole era of urban micrometeorites”, says Van Ginneken. “Since then, more and more people have been doing this as a hobby. Part of what Penny and I want to do is bring the science into it.” “Those missions are great,” says Wozniakiewicz. “They go to a single object, and they tell you a lot about that one object. Micrometeorites tell you about thousands, millions of objects… They tell you more about the population of asteroids as a whole, a snapshot of all the different processes, all the different bodies that are out there. And then you can compare those samples, along with meteorites, to the samples that are being brought back from these missions.
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