Title: Cosmic dust: a cosmochemical view of the origin and evolution of the Solar System.
Project ID: 20158W4JZ7 - PRIN 2015
Focus: Cosmochemistry of Antarctic micrometeorites to investigate origin and evolution of interplanetary dust in the Solar System.
Outline: The "Cosmic dust" project is a three-year project of national relevance (PRIN) which focuses on the cosmochemical study of two unique collections of cosmic dust already available in our laboratories: the Transantarctic Mountain collection and the DUSTER (Dust in the Upper Stratosphere Tracking Experiment and Retrieval) collection. The composition of the dust complex in the inner Solar System (seen from Earth as the zodiacal cloud) is the outstanding issue in astrophysics and planetary science that we would like to address. This will allow us to infer information i) on the nature of all the dust producing bodies including asteroids, comets, and perhaps planets and their satellites), which, besides, are targets of cur-rent and future space missions; ii) on the dynamical evolution of the interplanetary dust in the zodiacal cloud; iii) on the contribution of extraterrestrial matter to the geochemical bud-get of our planet.
Funding: Ministero dell'Istruzione, Università e Ricerca (MIUR) through Progetti di Rilevanza Nazionale (PRIN 2015).
Duration: 3 years
Start date: December 2016
P.I.: Luigi Folco, Dipartimento di Scienze della Terra, Università di Pisa, Italia, e-mail:
Research Units:
- Dipartimento di Scienze della Terra, Università di Pisa, Italia
- Dipartimento di Scienze e Tecnologie, Università degli Studi di Napoli "Parthenope", Italia