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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.
You mean Washington University in St. Louis...
*not* "University of Washington"
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
Washington University
Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day.
Teach him to eat and he will fish forever.
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.
When collected at high-altitude, the origin of six grains are from outside our solar system.
IIRC, someone once wrote that "...even God cannot tell carbon atoms apart." How do you pull something from the upper atmosphere and conclusively determine that it came from outside the solar system? Perhaps it would help to RTFA (and I will) but it just baffles me how these scientists are able to figure this stuff out. I'm starting to fall into that "Science as magic" category, I guess.
GF.
Lots of petrified grits
.. had god been smart and made the universe and everything within it with RFID tags. Imagine the possibilities ...
"Old man yells at systemd"
Background: 28/M/Bi-Sexual; Owner of a Linux company; MBA Harvard 2003; B.S. Comp Sci MIT 2000
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.
I suggest they check out the moon's craters for the dust residue from asteroid impacts...
this is not a sig.
Their intergalactic cries of "Look at this place. Where were you raised? In a barn?" contravene several interstellar conventions on peaceful coexistence.
A little reading would go a long way in your search for truth.
From the linked article:
Using the NanoSIMS probe, the Washington University investigators then measured the relative amounts of two isotopes of oxygen in more than a thousand grains from nine IDPs. The data told them which grains had come from stars.
From a link in the article:
The NanoSIMS is a first-of-its-kind ion microprobe in the Laboratory for Space Sciences in Arts & Sciences and is housed on the fourth floor of Compton Hall. The $2 million instrument is the first in the world built to analyze the isotopic and elemental composition of extremely small samples, such as interplanetary dust particles, at a sub-micrometer scale, allowing a first-time look at those particles' subcomponents.
And from a link on the NanoSIMS homepage:
Results: Of all the subgrains defined in 25 images from 9 cluster IDPs, roughly 1031 were measured with sufficient precision to distinguish solar material from circumstellar dust as shown in Figure 1. Only grains > 200 nm were measured with this level of precision. Six of these grains have O isotopic compositions which fall well outside the range of solar system materials, marking them as stellar condensates.
Seems to me like these cats know what they are doing.
"Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world." - Alan Greenspan, 1999
> 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
according to the article...
"Using the NanoSIMS probe, the Washington University investigators then
measured the relative amounts of two isotopes of oxygen in more than a
thousand grains from nine interplanetary dust particles. The data told them which grains had come from stars."
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
I go to Washington University right now. We Wash U people are used to this. Anytime we talk to family they say things like "Seattle is pretty rainy isn't it?" You'd think more people would have heard of a major research university with billions of dollars in its endowment. Sadly this is not the case. No love lost, we understand :)
It's mostly the college administration that is upset by "Wash U", since they're ever seeking higher ratings in the USN&WR college ranking and feel that Wash U isn't "respectable" enough.
As far as I know, the women who went to Wash U don't feel any differently... no, just polled one alumna, my wife, and she doesn't care.
If you really want to upset Wash U alums remind them their school is responsible for foisting wu-ftpd on the world....
> I found it interesting that commercial mining of asteroids was mentioned
> in the third article. Sure, raw materials are plentiful in asteroids,
> but wouldn't the cost of getting there far outweigh the benefits
> of the plentiful resources? I guess this would be practical if/when
> we run out of certain ores, or as an "While we're here, we might
> as well" measure, but I can't see it going anywhere otherwise
> until the price of space travel drops dramatically.
Yeah, it's an "economy of scale" thing. Once we have regular (and by regular I mean many companies each making daily launches) access to space, the incremental cost of space travel will be far, far below what we pay now in terms of cost per unit mass.
And, thing is, it doesn't cost much in terms of energy to get to any given asteroid once you're outside the gravity well of Earth. The only cost would really be time, since momentum keeps you going until you want to brake. So you start up a pipeline of automated mining probes to Ceres. Much like on modern microprocessors, the initial hardware cost would be greater, but you'd be able to transport mining materials at a much faster and more reliable rate than you otherwise would.
And mining in a low gravity environment (Ceres, the largest asteroid, has less than a thirtieth of Earth's surface gravity) should be far less energy intensive than mining on Earth, where you have to expend unbelievable amounts of energy to merely move mined elements from the mines to the transports, and where you're severely limited in machine travel range due to friction related to that nasty 9.8m/s^2 that we have to put up with all the time here.
And some asteroids will probably have minable minerals in abundance, and remote spectral analysis will be able to allow us to identify mineral compositions from millions of miles away. That does away with a huge portion of the work involved in mining on Earth, where you have to often indirectly figure out what minerals are hidden beneath the surface, wasting time by drilling all over the place. That costs money continuously, and you could save on that with asteroid mining.
There are probably some other things in asteroid mining that I'm not thinking of. I'm not miner, and my "engineering" knowledge is rather amateurish (I'm more of a theoretical guy, being a programmer and all). Maybe wear and tear of machines would be less (due to both that lesser gravity we discussed above and the total lack of atmosphere or microorganisms to break down the machine parts). Maybe there are social benefits, like higher morale for the folks who like to work in larger and more open environments (this century, maybe "getting away from it all" will mean accepting a job that lets you work fifty million miles away for a year or two).
Economies of scale, my man. We have to force ourselves to pay the high costs to continue the proliferation of new technology. I we don't do this, we go stagnant. Space launches these days are often more expensive than they were in the old days, even when you take inflation into account. It's because we stopped doing them so often. It saves a few billion dollars a year in the short term. But we might have made back those billions -- and far more -- by now from the direct and indirect benefits of building up an economy-of-scale framework of space travel. I mean, heck, we landed on Luna six years before I was born. We have space probes ten light hours away. We also have advanced manufacturing facilities on Earth now. Had we continued our push into space instead of borking it all in the seventies through the nineties, I imagine that we would have simple factories producing complex objects on the cheap (at least with products that require tons of work on a small amount of raw material -- no friction and no gravity equals huge cost reductions!) now. Chip fabbing companies would be looking at near to medium term options for building astro-fabs. Do you realize how much more precision in the sub-nanometer range you'd get in building chips when you don't have to worry about gravity and vibrations from the local landmass and atmospheric variables? I mean, crap, we probably would be able to further accelerate process shrinks. 3.0GHz on a 130nm process? What a backwards technology for a space-enabled 2003!
Economies of scale, my man. Startup costs are [almost] always prohibitive. That's how science and technology works. Live with it. But don't work to inhibit it.
-JC
It's full of dust!
Most of modern astrophysics isn't scientific, in fact.
As someone who studied astrophysics at university, I can honestly say that statement is just bull. Yes, astrophysics is mainly a theoretical science, but that doesn't make the science any less valid.
The fact that you couldn't get through reading A Brief History Of Time without dismissing its contents as "anything more than fantasy" suggests to me that you're the kind of person who doens't have the capacity for anything other than simple thought.
I'll ask you two simple questions that illustrate just how dependent science in general is on theories:
Q: How do you know that the Earth is round? (Ie, how can you prove it?)
Q: How do you know that gravity exists? (Again, prove its existance.)
Observational astronomy has helped astrophysicists prove and refine their theories. Want proof of the effect of gravity on light as predicted by Einstein's Theory of General Relativity? Then just look at gravitational lensing caused by the Sun. Etc, etc.
Astrophysics may be a relatively new science (it's less than a hundred years old) but it's backed up by astronomy (the oldest science) pretty damn well.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg