The cometary tray of the NASA Stardust spacecraft's aerogel collector was examined to
study the dust captured during the 2004 flyby of comet 81P/Wild 2. An optical scan of the
entire collector surface revealed 256 impact features in the aerogel (width> 100 μm). Twenty
aerogel blocks (out of a total of 132) were removed from the collector tray for a higher
resolution optical scan and 186 tracks were observed (track length> 50 μm and width> 8
μm). The impact features were classified into three types based on their morphology …