NASA Sweeps Up

corleth writes "The BBC reports that a NASA spacecraft has begun its second phase of collecting interstellar dust grains to be returned to Earth in 2006 for analysis. In 2004, Stardust will rendezvous with comet Wild 2 to collect gas and dust. This will make it the first mission since the Apollo programme to collect and return materials from an extra-terrestrial body. The JPL press release can be found here." The Aerogel that they're using is nifty stuff.

Re:Aerogel

[JDALaRose]

How remarkably short-sighted of you.

Re:Not at all

[Mt._Honkey]

Would it be OK to kill human children in order to figure out how to quickly factor prime numbers?

Your argument sucks. Is it OK to kill humans for meat? No, but I and most of the rest of the world thinks that it's ok to kill animals for meat.

Anyway, Gelatin doesn't come primarily from Horse Hooves. It is is made from the boiled bones, skins and tendons of animals [ivu.org], which is produced anyway by the meat industry as a byproduct. Get your facts straight before you start ranting.

Re:Not at all

[Mt._Honkey]

You're right. That's never happened to me before. Wow. It was a well crafted troll though. I guess that whole council thing should have given it away... and the fact that aerogel is made of Si.

Re:Not at all

[Dahan]

Hey, don't be dissing the PhysicsGenius... I bet he's got more PhDs than you do!

Re:Aerogel

[Psion]

Umm...PhysicsGenius, please do the research before you make claims about how Aerogel. It is made from SILICON, like glass or integrated circuits.

Questions

[PD]

1) Wasn't there a battery problem a while ago that some thought might prevent the Earth return? Did that problem get resolved?

2) The spacecraft looks like it's almost halfway between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Has there been anything send further from Earth and returned safely? I'd think that the parts of the spacecraft that return should have a place in the Smithsonian.

Re:Questions

[corleth]

Has there been anything send further from Earth and returned safely?

No. I'm not sure, but I think that record is currently set by the Apollo missions.

I'd think that the parts of the spacecraft that return should have a place in the Smithsonian.

Agreed.

-Karl

P.S. I'm afraid I can't help with the battery problem question. I wasn't following the mission at the time. I can't find any reference to it on the website.

Re:Questions

[cra]

Has there been anything send further from Earth and returned safely?

Too late at night for reasearch on that right now, but if you count radiowaves, they might have bounced some back from objects more distant.

oh!!!

[jimmytheant]

I thought, by the subject line, that they might be planning to put up a huge chunk of Aerogel to collect all of the stink'n space debri. Too bad...

Interstellar?

[Red Rocket]

In order to collect interstellar dust grains, wouldn't the spacecraft have to travel out beyond the heliopause? That's a pretty long trip. I don't think the pioneer or voyager spacecrafts have even made it there yet.

Re:Interstellar?

[Mt._Honkey]

I think that the submiter just used the term thinking that it meant "anything in outer space". Interplanetary would be the term to use in this case

Re:Interstellar?

[corleth]

Not true. Interstellar grains are defined based on their past history, and not their present location. Just because they happen to be in interplanetary space does not mean they are not interstellar, i.e. from outside of our solar system. -k

Re:Interstellar?

[Mt._Honkey]

But this is from a comet. Assuming that it comes from the Oort cloud, does that count as interstellar? Is the "border" of our solar system the end of the sun's heliopause? And where is that in relation to the Oort cloud?

Re:Interstellar?

[corleth]

The particles they are collecting are not necessarily from a comet. That phase comes later in the mission. The aim of this mission phase is to collect interstellar dust particles. Check out the BBC article referenced.

Interstellar, in this case, means from materials that were not involved in the formation of this solar system, i.e. either from another solar system or from whatever background materials accreted to form the various stellar systems in this part of the galaxy.

Regarding the "border of our solar system", that is probably more a matter of opinion that anything else. Personally I tend to think of it as being the limit of the sun's gravitational well. In other words, if an object is placed at a position with no net momentum (I know, a classical concept) it will tend to accelerate towards our sun if it's within our solar system. In reality, definitions of borders in space is largely futile.

-Karl

LA

[!splut]

They need combine this technology with those unmanned military reconnaisance gliders, and deploy about a million of them above LA. Maybe countelss flying hunks of aerogel can start us on the road to recovery after the Bush administration's wussification of the EPA.