Couldn't resist.
Posted on 01/19/2006 1:45:23 PM PST by NormsRevenge
SPACE CENTER, Houston (AP) - A honeycomb cluster of cells on NASA's Stardust spacecraft captured thousands of samples of interstellar and comet dust that scientists said Thursday could give them the first definitive evidence about how the solar system formed.
"Its cargo was an ancient, cosmic treasure from the very edge of the solar system - a treasure that formed when the solar system formed 4.5 billion years ago," said Donald Brownlee, a University of Washington scientist who worked on the Stardust mission managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
Some of the samples collected during the seven-year, $212 million mission will be sent to 150 scientists worldwide so they can study the cosmic grains.
The spacecraft swooped past the comet Wild 2 in 2004 and used a tennis racket-sized collector mitt, which contained the honeycomb of cells filled with gel-like material to snatch the dust particles.
The Stardust spacecraft looped around the sun three times to capture the interstellar and comet dust, which hit the gel at a speed six times faster than a bullet fired from a rifle.
The capsule containing the spacecraft's collector returned to Earth on Sunday in Utah and was transported to NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, where scientists opened it Tuesday.
"We had a long time to come up with all of the things that could go wrong," said Michael Zolensky, Stardust's curator.
What if the collector didn't open up correctly or the particles slammed with such force into the gel that they blew the material out, leaving scientists with nothing to study, Zolensky and other scientists wondered.
"We were really worried about that and got more and more worried as time went by," Zolensky said. "So when we opened the tray just two days ago in the lab, we were pleased to find that everything went exactly right - just fabulous. We couldn't have done a better job catching these particles."
Most of the particles, which appear black under a microscope, aren't visible to the human eye. But Brownlee said he and other scientists were surprised all of the particles weren't "purely microscopic."
"That's why we were jumping up and down," he said. "We were totally overwhelmed by the ability to actually see this."
Zolensky said scientists who study the dust will determine what minerals are in it and compare the dust particles to meteorites. They also will attempt to determine if the dust contains organic material.
"They are very small rocks, but they are rocks nonetheless. And what do these minerals tell us about how these grains form?" he said. "We think that much of the Earth's water and organics ... perhaps came from comets. So what will these samples tell us about basically where our atoms and molecules came from and then how they were delivered to Earth and in what amount?"
Peter Tsou, the mission's deputy principal investigator from JPL, said the sample return is historic.
"Tiny samples from a distant comet open giant windows of our past," he said.
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http://www.nasa.gov/stardust
Brownlee expects to find not a sign of life among those 100,000 particles of dust. He is an old curmudgeon when it comes to finding life beyond earth, although he thinks life is very common inside planets. He expects we are the only higher forms of life for a very long ways counting plants and animals of multicellular type as higher forms. Bacteria out there are likely, but not in these samples.
Couldn't resist.
Cosmic stem cells? Maybe we can clone the universe.
I know that. Here in Idaho it is so windy that the dust never stays in one place for long. Except behind my dresser...
Thanks for the ping!
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