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Stardust Probe Enters Comet's Tail Tomorrow
Tortured Potato writes "NASA's Stardust probe is about to pass through the tail of Comet Wild 2 at 11:40am PST, January 2nd. If all goes well, the probe will return the material to earth for research in 2006-- the first extraterrestrial material captured from outside the moon's orbit."
Yes,there WAS a bad sci-fi movie about this. It was called the Andromeda Strain. Based on a book by Micheal Crighton IIRC. Same guy who wrote Jurassic Park. The "probe" brought back a virus that somehow almost escapes into the wild from the containment lab. At the time it was pretty far fetched. but now who knows. It seems Science is not taking nearly as long to catch up to sci-fi as we might think it would.
It's a silicon-based solid with a porous, sponge-like structure in which 99.8 percent of the volume is empty space. By comparison, aerogel is 1,000 times less dense than glass.
The above line, and more, are available here
And yeah, I'd like to play around with some of this stuff as well. The picture of someone holding a 'brick' of it looks like a bad Photoshop job.
This could be very interesting in that there are rumblings that the "tail" of a comet may not actually be melting ice, etc (the dirty snowball model that is the current accepted theory). James McCanney has an interesting theory called the Plasma Discharge Comet Model.
From the website http://www.usinternet.com/users/jmccanney/
"The work showed among other things that comets were not dirty snow balls sublimating (vaporizing) in the solar environment, but were a complex plasma discharge interaction involving an asteroidal comet nucleus with the "solar capacitor", the capacitor being the result of a differential flow in the solar wind of high energy particles leaving the sun. The balance of charge in the solar system and a myriad of of other previously unknown effects were predicted by the theory, including the existence of an electron sheet arriving from the sun at a cometary nucleus and resulting x-rays. Only recently have these been verified by observation. The new comet theory also explained that the tail matter was not moving away from the comet nucleus, but was being drawn in by electrical forces millions of times more powerful than gravity or solar wind forces alone. Essentially a comet was now seen as a huge "cosmic vacuum cleaner". Comets were being captured into the solar system by the existing planets and the comet "tail drag" helped to circularize their orbits. Many commonly stated beliefs regarding the nature of the solar system were being dispelled with more subtle explanations. "
The implications of this theory are intriguing as it may explain how Mars lost its atmosphere as well as such bizarre things as the LaBrea tar pits and all of the trapped creatures in it. (Under this theory a larger body can pull elements from a smaller body if it gets close enough such that things such as oil may not be decomposed dinosaurs, but instead gets "rained" down when a smaller planetary body moves close enough).
Interesting stuff.
The significant problems we face cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them. -Albert Einstein