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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."
body massage.
Why does this sound like the beginning to a bad sci fi movie:
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Lara Croft Land
Natalie Portman covered with hot grits
RMS gone wild!
CowboyNeal: behind the blubber
Taco's new
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Not trying to troll, but what exactly is the point of sending a probe into the vapor trail of a comet?
FP
...could be used in the probing of Uranus.
devise a means to put a object in the path of a comet, (say halley's)land with a crumple shield and have it come back.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Stardust was the name of an operation to use weapons of mass destruction on Earth Fleets and the Earth itself in one of the later GUNDAM series.
and its phoning home!?! EGADS!
Didn't the scientists see Armageddon?!? Rocks in space are far too unpredictable!
The Unfolding Project
Hope the probe doesn't plan any side trips to Mars given how hungry the Martians have been lately...
Okay, for the 1000th time, let's get this straight people:
WE NEED space exploration. Just because some people died, doesn't mean we should completely stop space exploration. People who think like this should be shot. Following that logic, Spain, France, etc shouldn't have tried to sail "around the world" and find a new way to get to India. A lot of explorers died then, should we say that the discovery of America should never have happened because explorers died? Boo hoo. Cry me a river. Damn it, the human race will ALWAYS look for more adventures. WE will always try to search for new lands. WE will always keep researching new and better technologies. It's built into the human psyche; to always want for something new.
For you people who don't want to explore space, fine. Stay home and cower. Build a tinfoil hat manufacturing facility. The rest of us, the ones whose blood runs hot, will go out a blaze new trails for the rest of you to follow.
I don't know about you, but I would be happy to go up into space. Damn straight I would be more than happy to put my life in NASA's hands, because those people are doing the best they can. If they make mistakes, so what? Lots of astronauts died during the space race, but we NEVER gave in. If I died going up into space, I wouldn't blame NASA, and if anyone of my family did, I'd haunt them.
--
7333716
The linux hacker
The stuff that they are catching the particles in, That stuff sounds way cool, I bet I can come up with.....well no real uses but at least I could say I own some of the lightest solid on earth.
....well whatever but its cool, I cant find any exacting details on what its made of however
Colud it be used to build a semi-rigid airship ? Or
I wouldn't mind entering her mature tail and probing it deeply with my manprobe...
I was reading the PDF on the mission, and it said that "aerogel" would be used to capture the dust. The description of it makes it sound pretty exotic. What is it, exactly, and where can I get some to play with?
The way the article describes the process, it sounds a lot like a Rube Goldberg process to get a fistfull of dirt from space. If a good portion of it is ice, would it not be water by the time it passes back through the atmosphere before it gets studied? Let us hope this galactic dirt is not water-soluble. Then again, I suppose that might tell the scientists something in its own right.
On an aside, as I read the article I got an image of the monkey in the Lion King grabbing the dust and hair out of the air as it happened to be floating by. I guess the difference here is that were going to the dust instead of the other way around...
Be excellent to each other. And... PARTY ON, DUDES!
Well, it will be the first sample captured at a location outside the Moon's orbit by residents of this planet. Definitely not the first captured by this planet, nor by its residents.
...reached the limits of what anal probing could teach us.
dust grains will fly by the spacecraft at about 13,000 mph, or six times faster than a speeding bullet.
-calyxa
Decay! Decay! Decay! -Helium
Stardust Probe Enters Comet's Tail Tomorrow
*waka-chicka-bocka-chicka-wowawow-wow*...
I'm so very sorry. D'oh.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
This is a rip of this post by herrvinny (UID: 698679) right here.
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.
Disgruntled Apple users get vocal as Macworld looms
December 31, 2003, 3:25 PM PST
By Reuters
Can a few bad apples--like product-quality complaints and potential lawsuits--spoil the bunch for loyal fans of Apple Computer ahead of their biggest party of the year?
As enthusiasts devoted to Apple prepare to descend on San Francisco next week for the annual Macworld conference, at least two online petitions have collected hundreds of signatures from potential plaintiffs seeking to file lawsuits over claims of defects in the iBook laptop.
Another growing source of complaints surrounds Apple's wildly popular iPod line of digital music players, which many enthusiasts believe will get an upgrade at Macworld with the introduction of smaller, less-expensive models and a range of case colors.
In California, a lawsuit seeking class-action status is expected to be filed in January against the company over the claim that Apple's warranty does not run long enough to cover problems with the player's battery.
Apple has won raves over the years for its sleekly designed computers. The company, with a market share of around 2 percent, is able to command higher prices, due in part to Apple machines being perceived as more secure and reliable than PCs running Microsoft's Windows operating system.
Taken together, both consumer campaigns against a company that prides itself on high standards for design and engineering threaten to cast a shadow over Macworld, historically a forum for Apple and its charismatic leader, Steve Jobs, to showcase new products and innovations.
An Apple representative declined to comment on questions concerning pending litigation and claims of defective computers.
Users of Apple's iBook have been reporting problems with their iBooks in increasing numbers in the last few weeks, according to Ric Ford, president of MacIntouch, which runs the MacIntouch.com Web site, an independent site for Mac users.
But Ford attributed the increased chatter more to the fact that some users have narrowed in on the cause of the long-standing problems rather than the impending start of the Macworld show.
"I don't think it's really related to Macworld," Ford said. "I think the problems have been there, but people are starting to understand the source of the problems."
The difficulties stem from the iBook's logic board, or motherboard, users say in discussion forums and on message boards--including boards on Apple's own Web site. Many users report that replacement units have the same problems with display and video output.
Most of the complaints pertain to a particular iBook model with dual USB ports, and many users say the problems started to show up just after the computer came out of warranty.
One of the petition sites, BlackCider.com, which uses as its logo an apple with a screw run through it, has 408 signatures from potential lawsuit participants.
Site owner Michael Johnson also offers T-shirts with the site logo on front and "Ask me about my logic board" on back.
The other Web site, created by Brendan Carolan at PetitionOnline.com, has collected 850 signatures and calls on Apple to either extend the iBook warranties or offer a replacement.
Neither Johnson nor Carolan were immediately available for comment.
The claims of problems have also extended to the company's higher-end PowerBook line. Macworld magazine, in its December issue, said that because of defects, it had to return three of six 15-inch aluminum PowerBook G4s it had ordered for testing purposes.
Meanwhile, a video making the rounds of the Internet shows a man spray-painting the message "IPod's unreplaceable battery lasts only 18 months" on iPod posters.
The filmmaker, Casey Neistat, said in a note on his Web site, ipodsdirtysecret.com, that he decided to make the film after his unit essentially died in September and he was told the battery could not be replaced. Subsequently, Apple has begun offering a $99 battery replacement service.
with the recent failures of some other popular space project (=O), i hope this succeeds. from what i read the shields are only on the front, seems unlikely to me that a renegade particle might not hit the side, but im not expert.
troll alerts are OFFTOPIC and should be modded down as such
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.
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I was on a NASA committee involved in the predesign stages of the Stardust probe (we weren't designing it ourselves, rather we were consulting with one of the teams at the JPL who were) and this comet dust was one of our main points of focus. You'd think of dust as about the most innocuous stuff there is, but it was quite a challenge designing all the intricate mechanisms on the craft to be resistant to it - at the speed it travels, it can be like sandpaper on all the components.
It wasn't a bad move. It wasn't a virus. It didn't almost escape. It totally escaped. Not from a containment lab, but when a small-town doctor decided to crack open the probe. And it wasn't far-fetched.
Other than everything you said, you are correct.
This is the probe that has all those names engraved on a silicon chip. Their are a total of 4 chips, 2 of chip one and 2 of chip two. One of each set will remain with the probe and the other set will be returned to earth in the sample return module.
Google for it!
Some theories hold that the crucial organic materials for life, the amino acids and other things that eventualy became organic molecules, came from comets bombarding the planet in its early days. I dont really know the specifics though, IANA molecular biologist.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Stardust Probe Enters Comet's Tail Tomorrow
I can just see Beavis and Butt-head crapping themselves over this headline...
John Walker Lindh attacked in prison
SAN FRANCISCO - John Walker Lindh, the American imprisoned for taking up arms for the Taliban in Afghanistan (news - web sites), was attacked by a fellow inmate and slightly bruised, his lawyer said Thursday.
Law enforcement authorities confirmed the 21-year-old Lindh was attacked but would not disclose a possible motive.
The incident happened Monday night at the medium-security federal prison in Victorville as Lindh was preparing to pray, said his lawyer Tony West.
"Our understanding is that the inmate tackled John and began hitting him while screaming obscenities before running off," West said in a statement. Lindh suffered a bruise on his forehead, the lawyer said.
"John is fine," West said. "He's in very good spirits."
A law enforcement official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said: "It was a minor incident, a prison fight. He got a little scraped up, but he's fine. One guy was picking on him."
The official had no information on Lindh's attacker. The FBI said Thursday it was investigating.
The investigation started after the San Bernardino County Sun received an anonymous tip early Tuesday.
"Yes, I'd like to inform your newspaper that John Lindh Walker, who is incarcerated in Victorville, was assaulted this night by a white supremacist organization that is imprisoned there. Thank you," the male caller said in a voice message.
Lindh was sentenced in October to 20 years in prison after pleading guilty to supplying services to Afghanistan's Taliban government and carrying explosives in commission of a felony.
He has been at the prison northeast of Los Angeles since January. Before arriving there, Lindh had been held at a federal lockup in Virginia. He was moved to be closer to his parents, who live in Northern California.
Lindh was placed in the general prison population last month at his attorneys' request and was working as an orderly, cleaning indoors where guards could watch him, the Sun reported, citing an unidentified prison source. The source said that since Monday, Lindh had been in special housing, similar to solitary confinement, for his protection.
Federal Bureau of Prisons spokesman Dan Dunne said Lindh "is housed in a unit which is consistent with his individual safety and security needs."
The prison has more than 1,650 inmates.
The stardust name is also used by:
...the Stardust 2(a) will maneuver in from its parallel course to light Stardust's cigarette.
Except for those pesky chunks of comets, asteroids and God-knows-what-else that keep crashing into our planet. Now we've gone and done it! We're in a Space Race with gravity! I suppose the next bright idea will be to rid the world of evil or something....
"New causes for a new millenium: Stop plate tectonics! End supernovae now! Prevent animal predation!"
Goals for 2011: 1. Stop plate tectonics. 2. Prevent animal predation. 3. End supernovae now. 4. Rid the world of evil.
Ummm, nah. Even I'm not going to touch that one.
KFG
Everytime I try to imagine it passing through the tail I keep hearing the theme to Deep Space 9!
Good luck to it! I hope it has better luck than some of the other probes that have encountered comets. It's quite a nasty environment!
What if a probe were sent to a comet to crash into it in such a way that was redirected towards (but not quite directly at) the Earth? The comet might then enter orbit around the Earth and be retrieved with or studied from the space shuttle?
Unknown host pong.
" Not until January 2006, will Stardust and its precise cargo return by parachuting a reentry capsule weighing approximately 125 pounds to the Earth's surface. The word precise should probably be replaces with "precious". NASA should know better.
December 31, 2003: Philosophers have long sought to "see a world in a grain of sand," as William Blake famously put it. Now scientists are attempting to see the solar system in a grain of dust--comet dust, that is.
If successful, NASA's Stardust probe will be the first ever to carry matter from a comet back to Earth for examination by scientists. It would also be the first time that any material has been deliberately returned to Earth from deep space.
And one wouldn't merely wax poetic to say that in those tiny grains of comet dust, one could find clues to the origin of our world and perhaps to the beginning of life itself.
Comets are like frozen time capsules from the time when our solar system formed. Drifting in the cold outer solar system for billions of years, these asteroid-sized "dirty snowballs" have undergone little change relative to the more dynamic planets. Looking at comets is a bit like studying the bowl of leftover batter to understand how a wedding cake came to be.
Indeed, evidence suggests that comets may have played a role in the emergence of life on our planet. The steady bombardment of the young Earth by icy comets over millions of years brought some of the water that makes our brown planet blue. And comets contain complex carbon compounds that might be the building blocks for life.
Launched in 1999, Stardust will rendezvous with comet Wild 2 (pronounced "Vilt" after its Swiss discoverer) on January 2, 2004. A rendezvous with a comet is a little like a rendezvous with a Gatling gun on a foggy night. As Stardust plunges through the hazy clouds of gas surrounding Wild 2's core, dust grains will fly by the spacecraft at about 13,000 mph, or six times faster than a speeding bullet. The "eyes" of Stardust, an onboard camera, will peek out from the body of the craft through a periscope to avoid damage. A Whipple Shield--a stack of five sheets of carbon filament and ceramic cloths each spaced 2 inches apart--protects the rest of the spacecraft.
Stardust will use a material called aerogel to capture some of the fast-moving grains. Aerogel is a foam-like solid so tenuous that it's hardly even there: 99 percent of its volume is just air. The ethereal lightness of aerogel minimizes damage to the grains as they're caught. Mission planners hope to catch more than one thousand grains larger than 15 microns in the aerogel.
Wild 2 orbited the sun beyond Jupiter until 1974, when it was nudged by Jupiter's gravity into a Sun-approaching orbit--within reach of probes from Earth. Since then the comet has passed by the Sun only five times, so its ice and dust ought to be little altered by solar heating. Pristine dust from Wild 2 can tell us what the solar system was like before it was baked by 4.5 billion years of sunshine and radiation.
After the encounter, Stardust will loop around the Sun on a two-year journey back to Earth. In January 2006, home again, the spacecraft will eject the Sample Return Capsule (SRC), which looks like a miniature Apollo capsule. The SRC will parachute to Earth and, if all goes as planned, land in Utah where scientists will be waiting...
To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour
William Blake (from Auguries of Innocence, c.1800)
- Kaos games and encryption systems developer
That sucks. I submitted this same story with the headline "Spacecraft gone Wild", and never heard anything back.
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
Will the material be captured alive?
Back in 2000 I trained a group of engineers/science type folks at JPL in Pasadena. One of the members of that class was part of the smaple return program that has the goal of returning samples from Mars, several comets, and a some asteroids as well. Stardust is just one of many projects along these lines. Stardust had been launched before I taught the class but one of my co-workers had taught the Stardust group.
The crumple shield concept wouldn't work at the velocitys involved for most of the targets but odds are they considered it, just look at the airbags used for Pathfinder and Beagle2. It could still work for smaller asteroids though.
As to all the talk about pathogens being returned to Earth by these probes, ala "Andromeda Strain", I did ask. There is an department whose ONLY job is to work out how ANY cross contamination can be prevented, they don't want to put terestrial pathogens onto other worlds either.
I still worry about it a little but not as much as I did after that visit.
and the samples are safely returned to the planet
a/s/l here. Sorry, adding domain tags to your s
It may be a lot of effort for a small amount of mass but think of the implications if they found a few amino acids in there, or maybe take a wild leap and imagine finding life. Its not impossible and from the results coming out of verous research into where life can survive its not even that hard to believe. Just think of the effect the discovery of non-terrestrial life could have on scociety.
Then again that effect might be pretty ugly considering how people react to anything that contradicts their safe, warm, comfortable view of how the world is. The goverment would classify it in the interest of "national security" to prevent a civil war or something.
Stardust probe is about to pass through the tail of Comet Wild 2
Now, now. Comet Wild, what a nice name for a mare. And one needs some fantasy to call kis pecker "Stardust Probe".
Don't you all know comets are made of antimatter?
According to
matter-antimatter.com, this collision with the comet will kill us all!
She can suck the life out of me any day!
Soylent Green is peoplicious!
Now don't forget about Genesis, which will (hopefully) be returning solar wind samples in late 2004.
AC.
I guess there's a fine line between poking fun at someone's wording and trolling... I thought it was funny, anyway.
True story.
>Yes,there WAS a bad sci-fi movie about this. It was called the Andromeda Strain
Uhh... you mean one of the BEST sci-fi movies of all time. That's a little hard to swallow if you're from the Matrix generation...
PS - the book for Jurrasic Park was GREAT fiction. Please do not associate Hollywood's treatment of the story to the book. They are not the same. BTW his name is Michael Crichton.
Double-plus-good!
LOL
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
> people usually take 1000 meters per second as a bullet speed
From the article:
> dust grains will fly by the spacecraft at about 13,000 mph, or six times faster than a speeding bullet.
Or we could just cut farm subsidies, buy food from Africa and let them fix themselves with the money, which is more of a thought-out 'unified' fix for the problem. Africa's only a disaster because their only feasible export is strangled out of competition by US and Euro subsidies. If we didn't let the farmers and herders squeeze our officials by the balls Africa would be the breadbasket of the world!
There would also be other wide-reaching ramifications, getting produce from there to here quickly would lead to new transport technologies (bigger/faster/cheaper planes and boats) and African governments would have enough money to secure power from constant rebellions (which cause so much damage today because governments are too poor to maintain decent security). Safer Africa means tourism increases, and you have the beginnings of full-force modernization.
Here in the west, we tend to make things worse by 'fixing' both ends of a problem. We tend to not look at things from an objective and rational standpoint and instead let our (religious) morals and short-term benefits outweigh what would inarguably be the 'best' decisions.
As for all the places you suggest we get money from 'instead', THERE IS NO MONEY, we're running a huge defecit. The war in Iraq, Halliburton, all of that is money we don't have, it's being borrowed. We need to seek the 'unified' solutions I was talking about before because they INCREASE available money rather than divert or spend it.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
The plasma tails of comets are composed of unstable molecules that quickly break down in the presence of ultraviolet light from the sun. In order for this theory to even be even remotely correct, a mechanism has to be proposed for creating (and protecting from distruction) parent molecules in sufficient quantities in the inner solar system for a comet to "vacuum" up. The number density for these molecules would have to be quite high (relatively speaking), and the composition would be far out of sink with the composition we observe on the sun's surface, which would pretty much have to be the source. In other words, it just doesn't pan out.
Plasma tail dynamics is a very interesting field, but this theory doesn't even come close to the truth.
Shop Smart, Shop S-mart!
France never tried to sail around the world. The first navigator to find a sea route to India was portuguese (Vasco da Gama). The first to sail around the world was also portuguese (Fernao de Magalhaes, known in the USA as "Magellan" for some strange reason). The spanish followed soon after and, along with the portuguese, dominated most of the world for a few centuries. Eventually their colonies started to demand independence, and allied with England, France and Holland. And eventually got independent from those as well. Either way, the french were never good (or even reasonable) sailors. In fact, the average frenchman runs at the sight of water (which is why they need so much perfume).