Ooooohh! Comet Dust!!
After a seven year trek chasing comet Wild 2 the Stardust probe is back on Earth with about a million comet and interstellar dust particles inside a sealed canister.
For those who don't follow such stuff the particles in question are thought to be leftovers from the birth of our solar system some 4.5 billion (that's "billion" with a 'b'!) years ago, some of them could even be older than the Sun!
The folks at the Johnson Space Center in Houston will unlock the canister and a preliminary look-see send samples to labs all over the world for further study.
"Night of the Living Dead" concerns aside (confused? go rent the movie - get the original not the remake), this is pretty cool stuff. Dust particles from 4.5 billion years ago! Okay there may be some nearly that old under my couch but these are interstellar dust bunnies!
By the way the Stardust mother ship remains in orbit around the Sun and NASA is considering sending it off after another comet to snap photos but since the ship only had one probe there won't be an opportunity for a second Stardust sampling of cosmic dust.
Excuse me, I need to go gather my own dust samples via vacuum cleaner....
For those who don't follow such stuff the particles in question are thought to be leftovers from the birth of our solar system some 4.5 billion (that's "billion" with a 'b'!) years ago, some of them could even be older than the Sun!
The folks at the Johnson Space Center in Houston will unlock the canister and a preliminary look-see send samples to labs all over the world for further study.
"Night of the Living Dead" concerns aside (confused? go rent the movie - get the original not the remake), this is pretty cool stuff. Dust particles from 4.5 billion years ago! Okay there may be some nearly that old under my couch but these are interstellar dust bunnies!
By the way the Stardust mother ship remains in orbit around the Sun and NASA is considering sending it off after another comet to snap photos but since the ship only had one probe there won't be an opportunity for a second Stardust sampling of cosmic dust.
Excuse me, I need to go gather my own dust samples via vacuum cleaner....
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