Interstellar Candidates

Here is a list of “midnight” tracks found so far. These tracks point towards 12 o’clock if you imagine the Stardust collector as a clock. This is the direction of the interstellar dust stream.

Impacts in the midnight direction can also caused by debris from the Stardust spacecraft’s Sample Return Capsule lid. To tell spacecraft and cosmic particles apart, we must extract the particles in their aerogel tracks and analyze their chemistry.

Impact tracks that have been extracted have a Sample Number assigned by the curator at Johnson Space Center, for example the track identified in 7663035V1 was extracted and numbered I1043,1,30,0,0.

The first finder is the Duster with the first recorded click on a focus movie that contains a candidate track. We invite first finders to name their particles, for example I1043,1,30,0,0 is “Orion”. We verify first finders manually because some tracks appear in more than one focus movie.

Hylabrook, Orion and Sorok are Level 2 interstellar candidates, which means not only do they have a trajectory consistent with the interstellar dust stream (they are midnight tracks), but we have also verified that they are extraterrestrial. The default order of the midnight tracks listed below is first the tracks that have been extracted, analyzed, and assessed for interstellar origin at the top of the list, followed by tracks waiting to be processed in this manner (in no particular order). Analysis findings and other details on these tracks (if known), can be found by clicking on the track number in the first column.

Midnight Tracks