It will take several hours to fly through the coma - the cloud of dust and gas coming off the comet's nucleus. It will fly through the part of the coma ahead of the comet nucleus. Most particles from a comet are smaller than the diameter of a human hair. Comet particles will be captured using a material called aerogel. Aerogel is a special type of foamed glass, made so lightweight that it is barely visible and almost floats in air.
Comet particles make carrot-shaped tunnels in the aerogel as they are stopped.
At the pointed tip of each tunnel a tiny particle will be found. Less than one-thousandth of an ounce of cometary dust will be collected. More than 1,000 of the particles collected will be large enough for complete scientific analysis, plus millions of smaller particles can be analyzed as groups. Some of the powerful scientific instruments on Earth, used to study the cometary material, are more than 100 times larger and heavier than the spacecraft itself. Scientists hope to collect more than 100 particles from a newly discovered beam of particles streaming into our Solar System from other stars in outer space.