Tanpopo cosmic dust collector: Silica aerogel production and bacterial DNA contamination analysis

Abstract

Hydrophobic silica aerogels with ultra-low densities have been designed and developed as cosmic dust capture media for the Tanpopo mission which is proposed to be carried out on the International Space Station. Glass particles as a simulated cosmic dust with 30 μm in diameter and 2.4 g/cm^3 in density were successfully captured by the novel aerogel at a velocity of 6 km/s. Background levels of contaminated DNA in the ultra-low density aerogel were lower than the detection limit of a polymerase chain reaction assay. These results show that the manufactured aerogel has good performance as a cosmic dust collector and sufficient quality in respect of DNA contamination. The aerogel is feasible for the biological analyses of captured cosmic dust particles in the astrobiological studies.

arXiv comment6 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (2)

• Study of a Threshold Cherenkov Counter Based on Silica Aerogels with Low Refractive Indices
• Development of transparent silica aerogel over a wide range of densities

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Hydrophobic silica aerogel production at KEK
• Ultralow-density double-layer silica aerogel fabrication for the intact capture of cosmic dust in low-Earth orbits
• Fabrication of silica aerogel with $n$ = 1.08 for $e^{+}/{\mu }^{+}$ separation in a threshold Cherenkov counter of the J-PARC TREK/E36 experiment
• Silica aerogel for capturing intact interplanetary dust particles for the Tanpopo experiment
• Progress in development of silica aerogel for particle- and nuclear-physics experiments at J-PARC
• Transparent tiles of silica aerogels for high-energy physics