Life's Secrets From A Comet's Tail

An anonymous reader wrote to mention a Guardian report on the return trip of the Stardust mission, which has snatched material from the tail of a passing comet. From the article: "Scientists are particularly interested in comets because they believe they are rubble left over from making the solar system, which later played a profound role in the development of Earth. They probably delivered most of the water for Earth's oceans and bombarded our planet with complex organic compounds that could have been crucial to the evolution of life here. For these reasons, researchers have sought a source of comet molecules and designed Stardust to provide it." Wow, this thing has been out there a long time. When I Googled to make sure this wasn't a dupe, I ran across CmdrTaco's post about the Stardust probe entering the comet's tail - almost exactly two years ago.

Comments

Re:Hand of God or Comet Dust?

[IAAP]

But there are a lot of awesome reasons that you should learn about God

Isn't that what science is all about: regardless of your religious beliefs? See Newton and other scientists who considered their quest for knowledge as learning about God. Which in my case, has a lot more meaning than the myth in the Bible and other scriptures.

problem with cometary orign of earth's water

[iggymanz]

comets appear to contain much more deuterium than the concentration we find in earth's water (even allowing for half-life of deuterium). See: Blake, G. A., Qi, C., Hogerheijde, M.R., Gurwell, M. A., and Muhleman, D. O. "Sublimation from Icy Jets as a Probe of the Interstellar Volatile Content of Comets," Nature, 398, 213 (1999).