 It's one o'clock on a Monday afternoon, so you must be watching think tech Hawaii research in Manoa. I'm your host, Pete McGinnis-Mark, and today's guest is Hope Ishii, who is an associate researcher at the Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology at UH Manoa. Hope, you've got a fascinating topic to describe today. It's cosmic dust, and of course, people really aren't familiar with the term. Can we start off, just tell us a little bit, cosmic dust, what does that mean? Cosmic dust, so cosmic dust, the term comes from the fact that the dust comes from elsewhere in the cosmos, and it basically refers to the dust that's produced by bodies like asteroids and comets, comets when they actually release dust as they sublime, and asteroids oftentimes in collisions, and some of this dust actually makes its way between the planets to Earth and reaches an orbit where it actually crosses the Earth's orbit and comes trickling in through a stratosphere, and so we will collect some of it. So when we're referring to cosmic dust, this is material which lands on the Earth, or you go with spacecraft to pick it up, or you are over-driving on Mars, we'll look at cosmic dust. Usually we're talking about the dust that arrives at the Earth. This is the term that was given to us. And the reason that this dust is so interesting is that it comes from the small solar system bodies, the ones that didn't end up in large bodies where it got hot enough and high enough pressure for the bodies to differentiate and for the materials to change a lot. And so a lot of the materials that we're finding coming in this dust have changed very little since the beginning of the solar system. All right, so these represent perhaps some of the earliest parts of the solar system. So their chemistry or their isotopic ratios or their... Yeah, they have very undifferentiated chemistries, so overall their chemistries look a lot like the average chemistry of the Sun, of our solar system taken as a whole. They contain little bits inside them that are actually remnants from their production in other stars that predate our own solar system, so called stardust. So to backtrack a bit, are you a geologist? Are you an astronomer? Are you a physicist? What do you do? Somewhere in between. Somewhere in between. I like to call myself an astro-material scientist. Well, it's off the tongue very easily, yes, okay. Yes, so I basically study these... I study the materials using microscopes as opposed to the telescopes that an astronomer would use, but ultimately we're looking at the same kinds of questions, that is, what were the conditions during the earliest part of the solar system formation? What happened? What was going on? How did these materials come to be in the state that they're in now? And so we do this by almost a forensic study of these materials that we can... So it's a detective story in laboratory, yes. Yes, it is, yes, it's a detective story. So either we can look at materials that come to us, to the Earth, like the cosmic dust, or we can also go out to return to fetch materials and bring them back to the Earth. And for our viewers, when you talk about dust, are these particles the same size as dust in my house, or are they bigger or smaller? Some of the dust can be like dust you would find in your house, some of it can actually be fairly large, but for the most part, most of the dust is small, very small microscopic. The majority of the cosmic dust that we collect is around 10 micrometers, that's about a tenth of the diameter of a human hair. And so it's not the kind of thing you can see with the naked eye, but there are larger particles that do come in, they come in with less frequency, so 100 micrometer diameter particle lands about one per square meter per day. Oh, I don't know that. You brought some slides along just to give us a better understanding of what it is you're talking about. If we can go to the first slide please. And I guess here we're seeing cosmic dust equals construction dust, and we're seeing the sun on the left with some rocky asteroids going out to the cold parts of the solar system presumably, right? Yes, and the materials that I'm most interested in are those that come from comets, and the reason is kind of displayed in this schematic, and that is that the comets formed far enough away from the sun that the temperatures were cold enough that all of the water was present only as ice. And so everything in those cometary bodies was essentially in cryogenic storage. It's a kind of a time capsule, and so the dust that's coming from these bodies, from these time capsules is a way for us to essentially look back into the past and see what was available at the beginning of the solar system to form our planetary systems. And I get the impression that you actually can infer where some of these particles come from in a general sense. There is, yes, to some degree. So the cosmic dust that we collect, because it's just serendipitously coming through the atmosphere and we're gathering it, we don't necessarily know exactly what parent body object that particular dust particle came from. But we can tell something about what type of body it came from. So we can distinguish particles that likely have an origin and a comet from particles that maybe come from an asteroid that would have experienced more processing by liquid water as opposed to having only ice. And you can see that from the chemistry of the particles. And the mineralogy. And you have the ability to study the chemistry or the chemical composition of this really small piece of material that is less than a tenth the diameter of the human body. We do. Easy, right? No problem. Piece of cake. We do. We have microscopes that are capable of looking at extremely fine scales. And I have a slide later that we can look at in the second half of the segment that shows some of this. But we can actually use electrons to look at both the chemistry and the structure of these materials on an extremely fine scale. Amazing. Now we've got a second slide. I guess here we're looking at an image of a comet that was passing somewhere. It looks like Golden Gate Bridge in 2007. And why is it important? Here you've got a specific comet coming close to Earth. Yes. Yes. This one wasn't quite so super close. I included this slide for two reasons. One was to show what happens to a comet when it comes into the inner solar system and gets close enough to the Sun to warm up. And those ices that are part of the comet start to sublime away. They go from the solid ice phase to a gas phase and that actually releases dust particles. And so this is one of the big ways that cosmic dust is produced and then can find its way to the Earth. And then, yes, there are some dust streams formed by comets and also some formed by asteroids that the Earth passes through and that are known from astronomical observations. And so we can actually go and specifically target collections to that dust stream from that object. And some of our viewers might be familiar with the background here. I believe when we get meteor showers, sometimes in the year, we're actually passing through the tail of a comet. So for most people just looking up in the sky, it's a spectacular light show. But from your point of view, that's where you'll be getting a higher number of these small particles coming out of the surface. Yes. Yes. So I'm sure some of the viewers have gone out to see the Perseids or the Legions and those are named for the, usually for the constellation that the dust stream appears to come from. But, yes, when we have those meteor showers, those beautiful streaks of light across the sky, that's dust coming in. That's the time to go out a day or two later. And how does, you work for NASA, you get NASA grants. How does NASA actually do this kind of collection? Well NASA actually has been collecting this kind of dust for a long time, but starting about in the mid-1980s, NASA began flying stratospheric aircraft. And so these are airplanes that have extra long wings so that they can stay aloft at higher altitudes, almost twice the altitude that commercial aircraft fly at. And they are flown with little flags on their wings and adhesive on it, so silicone oil. And they fly for hours and hours and hours and basically are sweeping the air of these particles, come back down to close them up, cover them up, come down and land and then those are examined in the lab. So that was the, historically that's been the way that most cosmic dust has been collected. And would they collect like one or two during a flight or do they get, you know, the wings get heavy with all this dust? How much material is up there? So it depends on the duration of the flight and it depends a bit on how much, how many dust streams for the Earth has actually been crossing through. But so in perhaps an 18 or 20 hour flight, the flags are actually fairly small area. And so you're really collecting over a small area but at very high speeds and for a long amount of time. A large volume of air. Yeah, you're passing a large volume of air over the collector. And I don't know the actual numbers for typical amounts of particles but I do know that a lot of particles are also fragment and so you could probably end up with hundreds of particle bits on a plane. They're being hit by a supersonic airplane with this particle collector sort of thing. I'm not sure if the next slide actually shows one of these airplanes or whether it's the slide after the next but let's take a look and see. So these are the particles, right? Yes. So the... We're looking at a comet on the top left and microscopic views of different scales down to 100 nanometers on the bottom right. Yes. And this is a typical cometary particle that's being shown here in kind of a scale of going up in scales of 10 order of magnitude from about a 10 micron particle. And then on the right hand side there is an image that shows a crystal from within one of these particles. And what you're seeing on that there's some fine lines that go through the crystal and also what looks like kind of a blurry rim on the surface. That's actually the result of space exposure to the solar wind. So high energy solar ions actually pass through crystals in these particles and leave a little track of disorder. They basically disorder the crystal structure by passing heavy, high energy ions through the crystal. And then the lighter solar wind ions, hydrogen and helium, create this amorphous rim on the surface. And this is one of the ways we can prove that these particles were in space for over 10,000 or 100,000 years. Right. As opposed to there's a dust from the Sahara or something like that. And I see you on the slide, 30,000 to 40,000 tons per year. That's a lot of material. That's an estimate of how much mass of extraterrestrial dust is still coming down onto the earth and accreting. It seems a lot of material, I mean probably if it was all in one place that would cause a lot of problems. If it were all in one place it would be a problem. And the last slide from this session I think shows us just our collection mechanisms. Yeah, so here's a couple of different ways we've got the high altitude. They look like an ER-2 or a U-2. Yeah, these are the WB-57s. NASA also used to fly some ER-2s. It's the research version of the U-2. And so these are the planes that are used for the stratospheric flights with the very large wings in order to have enough lift to stay aloft at 20 kilometers altitude. That was the historic way of getting cosmic dust and the comet dust that I'm interested in. And then NASA also of course has flown some comet missions. And there was one that came back in 2006 with comet dust that was actually captured within special titles. That was the Stardust mission. That was the NASA Stardust mission, yeah. You were part of? Yeah, I was part of the science, the participating scientist analysis team on that. That was very exciting. So each of these collection methods has its advantages and its disadvantages. But one of the points that I had wanted to make was that that's kind of expensive. Flying a mission is a very expensive way to get comet dust. And of course the stratospheric flights also are relatively, they're significantly cheaper than a NASA mission, but also a fair amount of money to manage. Well we're about ready to take a break, hope of it. Right now I'm looking forward in the second half of the show, we'll actually look much close to the Hawaii and what you're doing at the university. But let me just remind the viewers, you're watching Think Tech Hawaii Research in Manoa. I'm your host Pete McGinnis-Marc and my guest today is Hope Ishi, who's an associate researcher at the Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology. And we'll be right back. I'm DeSoto Brown, the co-host of Human Humane Architecture, which is seen on Think Tech Hawaii every other Tuesday at 4 p.m. And with the show's host, Martin Desbang, we discuss architecture here in the Hawaiian Islands and how it not only affects the way we live, but other aspects of our life, not only here in Hawaii, but internationally as well. So join us for Human Humane Architecture every other Tuesday at 4 p.m. on Think Tech Hawaii. And welcome back to Think Tech Hawaii Research in Manoa. I'm your host, Pete McGinnis-Marc, and my guest today is Hope Ishi, who is an associate researcher at the Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology. And we're talking about cosmic dust today. And I hope, is there a connection with what you're describing about dust collection in Hawaii? Why are you here, for example? Well, it's actually very exciting because we have just started a new collection of cosmic dust right here in Hawaii. And as I was saying just before the break, historically, our ways of collecting cosmic dust, this dust from asteroids and comets and extraterrestrial sources, have been pretty expensive and difficult to do. What we are actually doing now is taking the same concept that's used in the stratospheric flights of sampling high volumes of air. And we are doing it here at Mano Loa, the Mano Loa Observatory. Interesting. Why Mano Loa and why not at Waikiki Beach? Well, that's a good question. Much better to be at Waikiki Beach. Ah, it depends. And we've got a picture of Mano Loa here. And I think that's you in the top right and your husband, John Bradley, correct? Yes. Yes, we set up this collection together. So Mano Loa Observatory is at an altitude of about 11,140, I think, feet. And the picture on the lower left there is the high volume air sample that we're using. And so the air actually goes through a very fine pore filter, gets pulled by a pump through this filter. And it's attached to the setup is also basically a device that measures the wind direction and the wind speed. And so when the wind is blowing down the mountain, down slope, and is a high enough speed, we turn the pump on and we collect cosmic dust. The reason that Mano Loa is so much better than Waikiki is because the slopes of the mountain actually heat up during the day and cool off at night. And this, because of the high altitude, this ends up generating a down slope wind at night that is strong and that actually overpowers the prevailing winds coming across the island. And the down flow of the wind actually brings a clean layer of the stratosphere. The lower troposphere actually ends up descending and being pulled down to Mano Loa Observatory. So I would imagine it helps that the observatory is a relatively high elevation, so you're above a lot of the water vapor and the dust. Yes, during the daytime the up slope winds actually tend to bring some of the credit that we don't like up to it, and we don't collect during that time. And then the down slope winds actually push that down. And so instead of getting material from what's called a planetary boundary layer where dust and dirt gets kind of stirred up, we are actually sampling winds right from the lower troposphere. And this is the same reason why Mano Loa is so great for measuring carbon dioxide. And why at the Weather Observatory in Mano Loa, is that the infrastructure or is it because they're doing meteorology or? Yeah, a combination of these things. So again, this unique meteorological condition is, here's the. Here's the slide we chose in the cartoon of Mano Loa. And we've got winds coming in off of the northeast and there's the Mano Loa Observatories and things like that. Yeah, so this unique atmospheric condition is ideal for getting clean air. That's relatively clean of terrestrial contaminants. Also, because we're in Hawaii on an island in the Pacific, it's fairly remote. We don't have a huge amount of anthropogenic that is human made, industrial contaminants. And we get a lot less terrestrial what is earth particles as well. So it's much cleaner. The astronomers will often look at either monocare or chili. But in this case, if you're trying to collect clean air, it appears as if Mano Loa is much a better site than Chile. Is there anywhere else in the world which is also a good site or? Yeah, Mano Loa is great. The other reason why Mano Loa is amazing is because there is this National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration facility there that is already collecting a lot of the weather data. The meteorological data that informs our collection. The other place where this approach is being attempted is in the Antarctic, where again, the air is significantly cleaner. But much more expensive. Much more expensive to go to the Mordo Station. Just to be very difficult, particularly during winter, for example, yeah. So terrific. So yet again, Hawaii is an ideal place for scientists to come and do. You're here, you've got national awards, and you're trying to do research here in Hawaii. Yes, it's a terrific site. It's a wonderful site. I think we've got another picture of one of your sites up next. And let's take a look. So here we see, yes, I recognize a monocare in the background, I guess, at the weather station, right? Is this one of your students? Yeah, this is actually Leante Adoro. She's a student who's been working with us on this project. She's a Hawaii Space Consortium student and space grant, excuse me, Hawaii Space Grant Consortium student. So she actually went up to the Montelua Observatory to exchange a filter one month. And on the right-hand side in the picture is Marty Martinson, who's on the staff at the NOAA-managed Montelua Observatory, who's helping us take care of the collection and actually helps send us filters. So it's a very... And they change the filters every month? Right, now we're changing filters every month. We're also looking at doing these targeted time to collections where we collect to coincide with dust streams crossing the Earth. Fascinating. Yes, it's been wonderful to have this infrastructure with this cooperative element. How much material do you find? A dozen particles in a month or hundreds? We're actually still fine-tuning our collection parameters a bit to reduce the amount of extra... There's a delay in the time when the winds change from upslip to downslips. We're still refining that a bit. But we're getting plenty of particles, but not too much of the terrestrial material so far. And of course, another advantage is, I believe you've got a fantastic lab here at the University at Monho, right? And the next slide, I think, will show either you or one of your students. We've got a lot of capabilities here in Hawaii not only to go and collect cosmic dust, but also to analyze it. Can you describe... Here we've got another one of your students, it seems, as if this is the space grant student, what she's looking at. Yes, so this is Leanne. She's actually looking at one of the filters that we collected that's been mounted to image it and carry out chemical analysis in a focused ion beam instrument, which is a specialized electron microscope, electron-flush ion microscope. And so she has been surveying particles that were collected and looking for ones that have compositions that would be consistent with primitive materials. And on the computer screen there, she's looking at enlargements, presumably, of the particles which are inside that gizmo with lots of... Yes, the thing that looks like a bit of an electronic porcupine microscope. And then she's using the controls to move around and analyze different particles. But this raises a question in my mind. How did you get involved in this kind of work? Or how do students, what career paths do they have? I mean, this is top-flight research science that you're doing here at Hawaii, right? And how did you get started? I think this is a great way to get started is undergraduate research programs, getting undergraduate students involved in actually doing hands-on research themselves. This is a terrific way. This is how I got interested in doing research and how I really got my start. And then in terms of this particular field, I kind of fell into it, actually, as I suppose a lot of us do. So I started working on the NASA Starter mission to begin with, actually. And so I was looking at ComaDust and interested in looking at other types of... Would you count yourself as a technologist or somebody who studies cosmic chemistry so you're more of a chemist or what skill is that? I like the big picture. I like to understand the big picture. And so although I do manage a couple of fairly specialized microscope tools, I prefer to be able to use whatever tools I can get my hands on to try and understand a story. Now, you like the big picture, but any discoveries yet? What would be a game-changing discovery from your point of view? Right now, we are trying to understand... We're trying to get enough sample and big enough sample to be able to analyze the organics in primitive comet samples to a level where we can say something more definitive about the inventory of organic materials that was available for the initiation of life on Earth. And that is something that scientists have been able to scratch the surface on, but because most of our comet samples are so small, we just don't have enough material to do the... Do you find anything which hints at being from outside our solar system? That would be quite a find if you had a piece of material from... Well, now, some of the dust that is found in comet samples is definitely remnant from Earth and other stars outside our solar system before our solar system formed. It's very similar to... We've had Ed Scott on talking about meteorites in the formation of the early solar system. This is just another piece in the bigger jigsaw puzzle of how our solar system formed, where the planets come from, what else is out there. It must be a fascinating career to be involved in this sort of thing. And from the sound of it, Hawaii really is at the forefront of this new low-cost technique in trying to collect dust. And this low-cost technique is going to end up being important. This high-volume sampling here on Earth is going to end up being important because it's just getting very expensive to do this kind of work. And it's great to see that you're bringing in young students to sort of pick up where your research is going and get to be more familiar with some of the instrumentation. That's exciting. We all have this desire to understand where we came from and how our world came to be. And this is the piece of it. Okay, well, I last hope we're getting near the end of the show. And I know you've got lots of other things which you could tell us in particular about some of the instrumentation that you have. So let me just ask you now, would you be willing to come back at some later time just to tell us about some of the cool equipment you've got in the basement of the university? Of course. Of course, I'd be delighted. Excellent. Well, let me just remind the viewers that you have been watching Think Tech Hawaii research in Manar. I've been your host, Pete McGinnis-Mark, and my guest today has been Hope Ishi, who's an associate researcher at the Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology. So thank you for watching, and please join us again next week at the same time. Goodbye.