Automatic detection of impact craters on Al foils from the Stardust interstellar dust collector using convolutional neural networks
Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
2021-11-03 v1 Earth and Planetary Astrophysics
Machine Learning
Abstract
NASA's Stardust mission utilized a sample collector composed of aerogel and aluminum foil to return cometary and interstellar particles to Earth. Analysis of the aluminum foil begins with locating craters produced by hypervelocity impacts of cometary and interstellar dust. Interstellar dust craters are typically less than one micrometer in size and are sparsely distributed, making them difficult to find. In this paper, we describe a convolutional neural network based on the VGG16 architecture that achieves high specificity and sensitivity in locating impact craters in the Stardust interstellar collector foils. We evaluate its implications for current and future analyses of Stardust samples.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2103.09673,
title = {Automatic detection of impact craters on Al foils from the Stardust interstellar dust collector using convolutional neural networks},
author = {Logan Jaeger and Anna L. Butterworth and Zack Gainsforth and Robert Lettieri and Augusto Ardizzone and Michael Capraro and Mark Burchell and Penny Wozniakiewicz and Ryan C. Ogliore and Bradley T. De Gregorio and Rhonda M. Stroud and Andrew J. Westphal},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2103.09673},
year = {2021}
}