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    Published: July 28, 2011

    Second Interstellar Dust Foil from NASA Stardust Mission Arrived at Field Museum

    Philipp Heck, Sr. Director, Negaunee Integrative Research Center; Robert A. Pritzker Curator for Meteoritics and Polar Studies; Head, Robert A. Pritzker Center, Negaunee Integrative Research Center

    Field Museum researchers at the Robert A. Pritzker Center for Meteoritics and Polar Studies have received a second target foil from the Interstellar Dust Collector onboard NASA's Stardust Mission - that returned the first solid extraterrestrial material to Earth from beyond the Moon.

    Field Museum researchers at the Robert A. Pritzker Center for Meteoritics and Polar Studies have received a second target foil from the Interstellar Dust Collector onboard NASA's Stardust Mission - that returned the first solid extraterrestrial material to Earth from beyond the Moon.

    The new aluminum foil – which measures about 14 x 2 mm – was successfully imaged using the Field Museum scanning electron microscope in order to locate impact craters from interstellar dust particles. The first Stardust foil from NASA was imaged using the Field Museum electron microscope earlier this year. In the coming months, crater candidates identified in preliminary analysis will be reimaged at higher resolution. Results from analysis of both foils will be presented at in December 2011 at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.

    “Interstellar foils need to be imaged and searched carefully, since craters are extremely small - on the order of one micron,” says Asna Ansari, who has been working as an intern with Robert A. Pritzker Assistant Curator for Meteoritics and Polar Studies Philipp Heck (Geology) on the Stardust project since January 2011. “We're searching for impact craters of the first samples of contemporary interstellar dust ever returned to earth.”

    The Field Museum group at the Robert A. Pritzker Center for Meteoritics and Polar Studies is part of the Interstellar Stardust Preliminary Examination Team, an international collaborative effort to identify interstellar dust captured by the collector flown onboard NASA's Stardust spacecraft. 

     

    Philipp Heck
    Sr. Director, Negaunee Integrative Research Center; Robert A. Pritzker Curator for Meteoritics and Polar Studies; Head, Robert A. Pritzker Center

    Philipp R. Heck serves as the Senior Director of Research at the Field Museum. Research at the Field Museum is conducted in the areas of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Life Sciences, Anthropology and Archeology, and is united in the Negaunee Integrative Research Center. Heck is the Robert A. Pritzker Curator of Meteoritics and Polar Studies at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, IL in the Science & Education department and a Professor (part time) at the University of Chicago's Department of the Geophysical Sciences and the College (https://geosci.uchicago.edu/people/philipp-heck/). 

    Heck's research focuses on presolar grains to understand our parent stars and the history of our Galaxy, early solar system materials, asteroids, and on the delivery history of extraterrestrial matter to Earth. For his research he studies the mineralogy and geochemistry of meteorites, micrometeorites and space-mission returned samples and also of fossil meteorites and micrometeorites found in Earth's sedimentary record. Heck joined the sample analysis team of NASA's OSIRIS-REx sample return mission. Heck was a member of the international research consortium to find and study the first modern interstellar dust returned by NASA's Stardust Mission. Heck is an executive committee member of the Extraterrestrial Materials Analysis Group (ExMAG) and is chairing the Microparticle Subcommittee.

    As the curator in charge, Philipp R. Heck oversees the collection of meteorites at the recently established Robert A. Pritzker Center for Meteoritics and Polar Studies, the largest meteorite collection housed at a private institution with more than 12000 specimens and more than 1600 different meteorites. Other responsibilities include the curation of the gem, mineral, rock and economic geology collections.


    Philipp R. Heck came to the Field Museum in March 2010 from the University of Chicago, where he was a postdoctoral scholar working on new analytical techniques for presolar grains. He obtained his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees at ETH Zurich in Switzerland in geo- and cosmochemistry. He then worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Max-Planck-Institute for Chemistry where he studied the first comet dust brought back from Comet Wild-2 by NASA’s Stardust Mission and at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he worked mainly on fossil meteorites and banded iron formations from around the world. For his studies he uses specialized analytical techniques such as secondary ion mass spectrometry (NanoSIMS, IMS-1280 and TOF-SIMS), noble gas mass spectrometry, atom probe tomography, scanning electron microscopy and electron microprobe analysis. Sample preparation for atom-probe work is performed with focused ion beam workstations.