Update on Automated Classification of Interplanetary Dust Particles

Abstract: Every year, the Earth accretes about 40,000 tons of extraterrestrial material less than 1 mm in size on its surface. These dust particles originate from active comets, from impacts between asteroids and may also be coming from interstellar space for the very small particles. Since 1981, NASA Jonhson Space Center (JSC) has been systematically collecting the dust from Earth’s strastosphere by airborne collectors and gathered them into “Cosmic Dust Catalogs”. In those catalogs, a preliminary ana…