Henner Busemann

TL;DR: The Stardust spacecraft collected thousands of particles from comet 81P/Wild 2 and returned them to Earth for laboratory study, and preliminary examination shows that the nonvolatile portion of the comet is an unequilibrated assortment of materials that have both presolar and solar system origin.

TL;DR: The presence of deuterium and nitrogen-15 excesses suggest that some organics have an interstellar/protostellar heritage and a diverse suite of organic compounds is present and identifiable within the returned samples.

TL;DR: Hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen isotopic compositions are heterogeneous among comet 81P/Wild 2 particle fragments; however, extreme isotopic anomalies are rare, indicating that the comet is not a pristine aggregate of presolar materials.

TL;DR: It is shown that hydrogen and nitrogen isotopic compositions in carbonaceous chondrite organic matter reach and even exceed those found in interplanetary dust particles, preserving primitive organics that were a component of the original building blocks of the solar system.

TL;DR: In this paper, a consistent database covering presently ca 550 nuclear reactions and containing nearly 15,000 individual cross sections of which about 10000 are reported here for the first time, providing a basis for model calculations of the production of cosmogenic nuclides in extraterrestrial matter by solar and galactic cosmic ray protons.