CO Ice in Interstellar Comet 2I/Borisov

This interstellar visitor appears to be enriched in super-volatile CO ice, published in Nature Astronomy. It is completely astonishing that this measurement has been made on an object from another planetary system! I love it, this is a great time to be a cosmochemist.

It makes sense to me that this comet may have sampled the very cold, outer regions of its own system, where it was also more vulnerable to ejection by a passing nearby star.

My dream is to identify one of these interstellar comets producing a lot of dust that intersects with Earth’s orbit, then do a targeted IDP dust collection with high-altitude aircraft, where IDP stands for interstellar dust particle, instead of interplanetary dust particle.