Day 3, end-of-meeting wrapup:
– NASA Hayabusa2 news. Ryugu preparations quite thorough, the body also a carbonaceous chondrite and thus also an organic source/contaminant issue. Can’t study Ryugu organics when you’re finding lots of lab/staff residues, can you?
– India’s space agency ISRO is looking to join an ‘elite club’: countries with stratospheric balloons returning cosmic samples. Balloons in the upper atmosphere can catch infalling micrometeorites/dust before they can be contaminated/confused with Earth dust. Such a program delivers (in small packages) “free” interplanetary materials. Literally: if the incoming particles are small enough, they escape the entry heating that ‘ruins’ full-sized meteorites.
– Grad student Guido Jonkers reports on the contaminated micrometeorites: those found in our roofs. Dust and micrometeorites fall all the time; it’s a matter of separating the cosmic samples from terrestrial/biological sediments. >10,000 micrometeorites have already been found this way, mostly from true amateur or semi-pro collectors. The majority are carbonaceous chondrite (or “cc-like”) material, like Ryugu/Bennu. Jonkers increases his odds and yields by his cosmic/terrestrial sorting processes. Where others use magnets, then hand-picking to find the micrometeorites, he has found extraction by solution, then centrifuge; his verification still requires a microscope but with more “wheat”, less “chaff” than before. Still, this is a rich bounty for those willing to hand-pick by microscope- that is, for amateurs with electron microscopes (or really powerful light microscopes, possibly?) Either way, yes, these extraterrestrial samples are all around for the taking!