Large Area Collectors

The Large Area Collectors are flown on the ER-2 in support of the NASA-Johnson Space Flight Center Cosmic Dust Program. The LACs are used to collect comparatively unaltered cosmic dust from the stratosphere at ER-2 flight altitudes of 65,000 feet and above. Sufficient quantities of extraterrestrial materials are collected to allow chemical and mineralogical compositions of individual particles to be determined. Study of these materials whose sources may be comets, asteroid collisions, planetary impacts, and meteorite ablation provide valuable information about the origin and the history of the solar system.