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Our group seeks to understand the origin of the Solar System in the broader context of the local Galaxy through analyses of extraterrestrial materials (rocks and dust from asteroids and comets, circumstellar and interstellar grains, and samples of the solar wind).

We are a part of the Physics Department and the McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, and collaborate closely with the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences.

Follow the links for more information.

News

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Brendan: Ph.D.!

Yesterday Brendan successfully defended his Ph.D. The title of his dissertation was “Correlated SEM, FIB, and TEM studies of Material Collected by the NASA Stardust Spacecraft”. He talked about all the cool science he’s done while studying some of the most challenging and important extraterrestrial materials in our collection. Congratulations Brendan!

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Presolar Grain Database

We’ve moved the presolar grain database to a group-editable Google Sheets format in an effort to keep it up-to-date and error free. My summer student last year Drew did a great job fixing a lot of errors in the database. If any of my esteemed colleagues would like to help maintain the database please let …

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Presolar Grain Searching

This is the type of data we look at to identify isotopically anomalous presolar grains (micrometer sized dust that formed around other stars before the Solar System’s formation).