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Collecting Stardust
An anonymous reader writes "Washington University in St. Louis space scientists are reporting the first definitive laboratory dissection of an interstellar dust particle, thus pulling out each grain's history individually. When collected at high-altitude, the origin of six grains are from outside our solar system. 'Space' is full of dust, or ejected material from long-dead stars. In this case, 3 of the 6 dust grains are from red giant stars, and perhaps 2 are from supernovae. In the next 5 years, there are six missions targeting a rendezvous with either a comet or asteroid, including the Stardust mission to return the first extraterrestrial samples since Apollo. That only leaves 100 billion comets left to explore in our own solar system's Oort cloud." Update: 02/28 17:22 GMT by M : Fixed university name.
In other news, David Bowie is suing for patent infringement, claiming he IS stardust... ok, so it's weak......I'm tired and the coffee maker is broken ;)
Sadly, the sorting and cataloguing procedure was halted today after an inattentive graduate student sneezed the entire collection over the lab
Sincerely,
David Bowie
In Soviet Rush, today's Tom Sawyer gets high on you.
This obviously points to the rumour that nasa has started training old women for the 'space cleanup' - removing all space dust and debris from the upper atmosphere. Old women have several advantages aside from being expert cleaners, they are lightwieght, require little food or sleep, their bones are brittle anyway and they have absorbed enough cherry to keep them radiation-free for months at a time.
.. had god been smart and made the universe and everything within it with RFID tags. Imagine the possibilities ...
"Old man yells at systemd"
Wonderful. I suppose Project Wildfire will be activated shortly, following the mysterious death of all but two people (a baby and an old man) living in a desert town somewhere...
Perhaps this time they won't hire any epileptics.
If space is a giant vacuum, shouldn't it be picking up all this dust?
Worst. Sig. Ever.
"...including the Stardust mission..."
:)
Ziggy learned to play guitar, flying high with...
etc...
sorry, had to do it.
-r-
If dust is from diffrent stars then wouldn't it be obvious that its from a diffrent solar system?
http://www.BackYardParty.com
I even have his 80's "Fashion" stuff. I do miss the Spiders from Mars...
(sigh)
I'm having trouble believing that *everyone* who went there is like that. I think what you meant to say was something like:
'I have very few sources of pride in my life, so I obsess over trivia such as the name of my old school -- desperate for anything, no matter how trivial or laughable it may seem to others, that will allow me to tell myself for a precious second or two that I am in some minute way superior."
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
Their intergalactic cries of "Look at this place. Where were you raised? In a barn?" contravene several interstellar conventions on peaceful coexistence.
> Once you've seen one comet, you've seen em all.
I dunno about that. On Star Trek last year, they had a comet with earthlike gravity. Now that's damned impressive, and it must be true since its on TV.
Maybe there are other unique comets out there, like ones with bizarre technobabble-inhibiting EM fields and occasional spaceberry orchards. ^_^
-JC
It's full of dust!