Friday 17 September, 4 PM CET
LUIGI FOLCO
ABSTRACT: TAM micrometeorites sample the flux of cosmic dust falling to Earth over significant timescales (>1 million years). Such an extraordinarily long collection time has resulted in the accumulation of many thousands of individual particles. This includes an abundance of otherwise rare giant micrometeorites (orders of magnitude larger than previously found in other collections) which are thus suitable for multi-analytical investigations.
Our ambitious objective is to use the TAM micrometeorite collection to define the composition of the micrometeorites flux to Earth over the over the last 1 million years (mass, size, compositional type and source bodies in the Solar System), thereby providing a world-class reference dataset for cosmic dust studies. This will serve as a ground-truth resource for investigating: i) the composition of the dust complex in the inner Solar System; ii) the nature and geology of all the dust producing bodies including asteroids, comets, and perhaps planets and their satellites, which are also the targets of current and future space missions; iii) the dynamical evolution of the interplanetary dust in the zodiacal cloud; the contribution of extraterrestrial matter to our planet's geochemical budget; iv) variations in the cosmic dust flux to Earth in the Earth's sedimentary record through time and the break up histories of asteroids and comets in their source regions.