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.

Comments

Re:well,

[mmol_6453]

Why bother, when we have craters on Earth to look at instead? The point is that we haven't been there, we haven't specifically looked at the object, so we technically don't know what it is.

You see, that's science. Other examples might be...

• ...why did we send flyby probes to other planets when an orbital telescope could tell us just as much?
• ...why spend money on an orbital telescope when we see** just as much from higher-altitude observatories?

How long would it have been before we were sure about about the Van Allen radiation belts, if we we hadn't sent probes up to check?

(**) Yes, I know you have to deal with refraction and diffraction and turbulance and clouds, but we've got technology to deal with all of that now.