NASA researchers and scientists from the United States, Germany and Japan have found a new mineral in material that likely came from a comet.

The mineral, a manganese silicide named Brownleeite, was discovered within an interplanetary dust particle, or IDP, that appears to have originated from comet 26P/Grigg-Skjellerup. The comet originally was discovered in 1902 and reappears every 5 years. The team that made the discovery is headed by Mr Keiko Nakamura Messenger, a space scientist at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.

The mineral was surrounded by multiple layers of other minerals that also have been reported only in extraterrestrial rocks. There have been 4,324 minerals identified by the International Mineralogical Association, or IMA. This find adds one more mineral to that list.

The IMA-approved new mineral, Brownleeite, is named after Donald E. Brownlee, professor of astronomy at the University of Washington, Seattle. Brownlee founded the field of IDP research. The understanding of the early solar system established from IDP studies would not exist without his efforts. Brownlee also is the principal investigator of NASA's Stardust mission.

Since 1982, NASA routinely has collected cosmic and interplanetary dust with high-altitude research aircraft. However, the sources of most dust particles have been difficult to pin down because of their complex histories in space. The Earth accretes about 40,000 tons of dust particles from space each year, originating mostly from disintegrating comets and asteroid collisions. This dust is a subject of intense interest because it is made of the original building blocks of the solar system, planets, and our bodies.