It's difficult to imagine, but tiny specks of cosmic dust hold important clues to nothing less than the evolution of our solar system. There is a catch, though. The precious particles – collected during NASA's 1999 Stardust mission to the comet Wild 2 – are trapped inside a special silica aerogel. How to retrieve them safely?
Enter Aiden Martin, a doctoral student in physics at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS). "The problem is mostly the size of the particles. Some are a micron in size or even less," Martin says. A micron is 100 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair. Until now, techniques for isolating and extracting the particles from their foam-like cocoon involved inserting fine glass needles into the silica aerogel, too often damaging the particles in the process.
With a John Stocker scholarship from Australia's Science and Industry Endowment Fund, Martin has been able to tackle the problem with fellow UTS physicists Dr Igor Aharonovich, Professor Milos Toth and Dr Charlene Lobo, and astrophysicist Dr Eric Silver from the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics (HSCA) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "I was at the Harvard-Smithsonian last October," Martin says. "What an awesome place."
Read the full story in the UTS Newsroom.