Robert O. Pepin

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: 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: In this paper, the authors report measurements of noble gases in Stardust material and conclude that the gases are probably carried in high-temperature igneous grains similar to particles found in other Stardust studies.

TL;DR: Pepin et al. as mentioned in this paper used step-heating to extract light noble gases implanted in a suite of 13 individual lunar ilmenite and iron grains and in the Kapoeta howardite by solar wind (SW) and solar energetic particle (SEP) irradiation.

TL;DR: Brownleeite, ideally stoichiometric MnSi, is a manganese silicide not previously observed in nature that was discovered within an interplanetary dust particle that likely originated from a comet.