Zack Gainsforth
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…
We assess whether chondrules, once-molten mm-sized spheres filling the oldest meteorites, could have formed from super-km/s collisions between planetesimals in the solar nebula. High-velocity collisions release hot and dense clouds of…
In a consortium analysis of a large particle captured from the coma of comet 81P/Wild 2 by the Stardust spacecraft, we report the discovery of a field of fine-grained material (FGM) in contact with a large sulfide particle. The FGM was…
The oxidation state of iron in the interstellar medium (ISM) can provide constraints on the processes that operated on material in the protosolar disk. We used synchrotron-based X-ray absorption spectra of several mineral standards and two…
Individual particles from comet 81P/Wild 2 collected by NASA's Stardust mission vary in size from small sub-$\mu$m fragments found in the walls of the aerogel tracks, to large fragments up to tens of $\mu$m in size found towards the termini…
Near-field infrared spectroscopy by elastic scattering of light from a probe tip resolves optical contrasts in materials at dramatically sub-wavelength scales across a broad energy range, with the demonstrated capacity for chemical…