This year at LPSC, we will report on the past year of our consortium study of Stardust cometary tracks, with the goal of exploring the chemical, mineralogical and isotopic diversity of materials returned from comet 81P/Wild 2. We extracted six tracks from aerogel tile C2031 using our keystone extraction technique, and studied the materials and terminal … More LPSC Abstract on Stardust Particles
The presence of hydrated minerals in chondrites indicates that water played an important role in the geologic evolution of the early Solar System; however, the process of aqueous alteration is still poorly understood. We investigated the oxygen isotopic compositions of secondary minerals in CR chondrites to constrain fluid conditions on the asteroidal parent body. Calcite, … More New Paper on CR Chondrites
On Tuesday at LPSC 2017, I presented my latest results on the redox conditions for formation of Al-rich chondrules. Al-chondrules are important to planetary science as they represent some of the earliest formed materials in the Solar System; however, the environmental conditions and mechanisms of formation remain largely unknown. You can check out a high-res … More Aluminum-rich chondrules formed under reducing conditions in the solar nebula
Did you know that some asteroids were once wet? We used radiometric dating to discover that water flowed on primitive asteroids over 4.5 billion years ago. To learn more about this and what it means about the early history of our Solar System, read more here.
Image credit: Bill Stafford (JSC), NASA @Astromaterials Samples collected by NASA missions and returned to Earth require delicate preparation and complicated analytical techniques. Some samples, such as comet dust collected from the Stardust mission, or interplanetary dust particles (IDPs) collected from the Earth’s stratosphere, are particularly tricky to work with as many of the samples … More Joint LPI/JSC Sample Training
The Lunar and Planetary Institute has a great classroom illustrations resource for teachers and educators. On their site, you can find useful images that explain a wide variety of planetary processes, such as lunar cratering and impact morphology. I helped to illustrate/re-design many of these diagrams for digital media, such as the ones below. Check … More Classroom Images
Christie Jilly-Rehak 