Yearly Archives: 2008

We are going to have about an hour of downtime on Friday, Dececmber 19th starting at 10 am, (PST). We’ll be doing software updates and code speed ups. Thanks,Stardust at Home Admins

We’ve had a successful time at Heidelberg so far. In the first week we shot aerogel tiles with 1/2 micron sized spheres of latex imbued with sulfur and coated with a conductive polymer. This yielded the first successful artificial tracks with known impactor size and velocities in the range of […]

We have been working with our colleagues at the University of Heidelberg, Germany for the last two weeks, using their tandem van de graaf dust accelerator to fire submicron dust particles into aerogel tiles and aluminum foils.  Zack Gainsforth from Berkeley is working with Frank Postberg, Ralf Srama and Eberhard […]

We are going to have about one hour of downtime on Thursday, October 16th starting at 11 am, (PDT). We’ll be doing some software updates. Thanks,Stardust at Home Admins

The area around Johnson Space Center was heavily affected by Hurricane Ike, and people there are still recovering.  Thankfully, there was no damage to Building 31, where the Stardust and Cosmic Dust Labs are located.  However, a number of people had severe damage to their houses, and as a result […]

At noon CDT on Thursday September 11, JSC was completely shut down in preperation for Hurricane Ike.  The massive category two hurricane will likely make a direct hit near Galveston, TX, and, although the exact location is yet uncertain, the large diameter of Ike’s eye means that the eyewall will […]

We have finished the analysis now of six of our interstellar candidates — one by Scanning Transmission X-ray Microscopy (STXM) at the Advanced Light Source (ALS) synchrotron at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and five by high-resolution Synchrotron X-ray Fluorescence (SXRF) Microscopy at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF). All candidates […]

We’ve analyzed five of our interstellar candidates on beamline ID22 at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble, France. Our colleagues there are Alexandre Simionovici (University of Grenoble), Laurence Lemelle (University of Lyon), Pierre Bleuet (ESRF), and Romain Basset (University of Lyon).  This is a highly sophisticated synchrotron beamline […]

Here is an update on where we are on extractions.We were extracting in Houston the week before last, and progress was very slow-we had to abort two overnight extractions because of problems with the needle wandering and in both cases endangering the targets.  This was mysterious behavior, and we were […]

Last Friday afternoon we extracted the first interstellar candidate from the Stardust interstellar tray. It is the one first identified by magickestrel on the candidates page. (Does anyone know how to contact him? I invited him by e-mail to name this feature back in October, but got no response.) 355 […]