Hypervelocity capture of meteoritic particles in nonsilica aerogels

The Stardust mission captured particles from the comet 81P/Wild 2 in gradient density silica aerogel and returned the collected samples to earth in 2006. The analyses of these particles have revealed several new insights into the formation of our solar system. However, since the aerogel used as the capture material was silica, the elemental analyses of the silica-rich particles were made more complicated in certain ways due to the mixing of the silicon of the particles and that of the aerogel. By using a nonsilica aerogel, future elemental analyses of silica-rich particles captured in aerogel could be made more straightforward. Resorcinol/formaldehyde (RF), alumina, and zirconia aerogels were impact tested with meteoritic fragments and the captured fragments were mapped with synchrotron-based X-ray microprobe (XRM) and the particles were analyzed with X-ray fluorescence (XRF). The resorcinol/formaldehyde aerogel proved to be the best capture material, in that it could be keystoned and XRF could be used to locate and analyze particles that were less than 10μm.