Zack Gainsforth

Zack Gainsforth has worked at the University of California’s Space Sciences Laboratory for the last two decades. He studies the history of the solar system using samples returned by NASA and JAXA missions as well as meteorites including samples originating in interstellar space, comets, asteroids, the Moon and Mars. He is especially interested in connecting the dots between epochs of solar system formation.

His work on NASA’s Stardust mission included characterizing some of the first interstellar dust returned to Earth and determining the formation history of comet Wild 2. His work on NASA’s OSIRIS-REx and JAXA’s Hayabusa 2 missions has included determining the petrography of asteroids Bennu and Ryugu, and the relationship of organic species to their mineral environment. He primarily uses a suite of electron and X-ray microscopy techniques that reveal the structures of extraterrestrial rocks at multiple scales from the atomic to the macro.