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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.
Least entertaining article ever to contain the words "Snatch" and "Tail" in the first sentence...
OMG OMG! This is a du-...... Errr, nevermind.
Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices. -Theodor Adorno
Was it...
a. No more dupes.
b. Use Google more.
c. More commentary in story submissions.
no, sorry the answer was CowboyNeal.
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
Almost. The Genesis probe was to collect solar wind particles, and had no actual chute failure. What had happened was that accelerometers designed to trigger the chutes once the unit had reached the appropriate speed were installed backwards.
As is to be expected in this situation, the probe wasn't flying backwards when it needed to trigger the chutes and subsequently it hit the desert with a rather satisfying thud.
This mission to the comet's tail is very, very similar with an almost identical 'landing' planned. Lets hope the same guy didn't fit components on both.
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
This article isn't a dupe; its a followup.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
Slashdot actually has a search function built-in! There is a little search box down in the lower left of the webpage that anyone can use. It is especially usefull when searching for dupes. Check out this example:
http://science.slashdot.org/search.pl?query=stardu st
You can see that this very story was posted twice already on the 22nd, not to mention all of the older references.
And as you tread the halls of sanity, You feel so glad to be, Unable to go beyond. I have a message, From another time..
You are one of those rare individuals who make satire superfluous. I thank you, for you make the world a more joyous place in which to live.
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.
Screw the secrets of the universe. Someone checked to make sure it wasn't a dupe!
"I'm going to f***ing bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to f***ing kill Google"
When I Googled to make sure this wasn't a dupe
Zonk, it's January the first, not April! Guess someone's still under the influence from last night's celebrations...
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Voyager has been out there a long time. Pioneer has been out there a long time. This spacecraft has 128MB of memory on board. In my day, we made probes with 64K of memory, and we liked it.
> I have intense religious experiences on a frequent occurance
Dude, that's your hand, not God's.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/photo/comet3d.html -
Stardust's mission has gone relatively smoothly- I've been checking in every few months because I can't help but be impressed by scale of this experiment. And this time, they ever thought to put a parachute in the return capsule, unlike that other probe which captured solar wind particles, then smashed into the desert floor when the stunt 'copters didn't make the catch. (The sun must've been in their eyes...) The comet pass-through two years ago might have been overshadowed by the Mars Rover(s) story- one of 'em landed just around the same time as Stardust's Wild 2 encounter.
I came, I saw, I left. It looked better in the brochure.
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).