The NASA Stardust Interstellar Dust collection provides our current best sample set for direct laboratory analysis of dust grains from the contemporary interstellar dust stream. While a handful of likely interstellar dust grains were identified within the silica aerogel collection media, interstellar dust also impacted Al foils covering the collector frame. Locating these rare impacts requires labor-intensive collection and examination of tens of thousands of high-resolution SEM images. Here, we implement a Python-based algorithm to dramatically reduce the human time investment needed to locate impact craters. The algorithm employs a circular Hough transform to identify circular features in the foil images, followed by several tests to detect characteristic morphological features of impact craters—a dark center and a bright rim, with inclusion of multi-core processing capabilities to significantly increase processing speed. For most data sets, the code produced a pool of potential crater candidates in 1–5% of the input images, producing a more manageable subset of images for a human expert to review. We used this code to locate 31 impact craters across 12 Stardust interstellar foils, 25 of which were located on three adjacent foils, I1008W,1, I1009N,1, and I1020W,1. Many impacts on these foils formed shallow, oblique craters, with residue compositions consistent with solar cell glass and orientations consistent with debris ejected from the spacecraft solar cells. The code can be integrated into future searches for Stardust interstellar grain impacts and can be implemented as a general utility for dust impact studies on spacecraft materials.

中文翻译：

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计算机辅助快速检测星尘星际箔上的灰尘和碎片撞击坑

NASA Stardust 星际尘埃系列提供了我们目前最好的样本集，用于对当代星际尘埃流中的尘埃颗粒进行直接实验室分析。虽然在二氧化硅气凝胶收集介质中发现了少量可能的星际尘埃颗粒，但星际尘埃也影响了覆盖收集器框架的铝箔。定位这些罕见的影响需要对数以万计的高分辨率 SEM 图像进行劳动密集型收集和检查。在这里，我们实施了一种基于 Python 的算法，以显着减少定位撞击坑所需的人力时间投入。该算法采用圆形霍夫变换来识别箔图像中的圆形特征，然后进行多次测试以检测撞击坑的特征形态特征——暗中心和亮边缘，包含多核处理功能，可显着提高处理速度。对于大多数数据集，代码在 1% 到 5% 的输入图像中生成了一组潜在的陨石坑候选者，从而生成了一个更易于管理的图像子集供人类专家查看。我们使用此代码在 12 个星尘星际箔片上定位了 31 个撞击坑，其中 25 个位于三个相邻的箔片上，I1008W,1、I1009N,1 和 I1020W,1。对这些箔的许多撞击形成了浅的、倾斜的陨石坑，残余成分与太阳能电池玻璃一致，方向与航天器太阳能电池喷射的碎片一致。该代码可以集成到未来对 Stardust 星际颗粒影响的搜索中，并且可以作为对航天器材料的尘埃影响研究的通用实用程序来实施。