Stardust Recovery
I had
written earlier about the recovery of the Stardust Capsule.
It turns out that the mission was a complete success and the scientists are delighted at the amount of comet debris that was collected.
Astrobiology Magazine
has the story:
Dissecting Stardust
As they clustered around the Stardust sample return capsule, Donald Brownlee, Stardust principal investigator from the University of Washington in Seattle, warned his team they might not be able to see any comet dust. The tiny particles may have made such small tracks in the aerogel collector that they would not be visible to the naked eye.
Wearing white bunny suits in a clean room at Johnson Space Center, the team anxiously examined the collector tray… and then broke into delighted celebration. Small black holes dotted the wispy aerogel tiles, and some were as large as half a centimeter wide.
The holes are carrot-shaped, with a large entry hole that tapers to a point. The first photograph of a cometary particle shows it residing in the very tip of the tunnel it drilled, like the dot of an exclamation point. The particle is only 11 microns across, and appears to be a transparent mineral grain.
"Scientifically, that's great, because there's been lots of discussion of whether comets contain minerals or glass," says Brownlee.
Michael Zolensky, Stardust curator and co-investigator from the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, was among those excited to see evidence of the tiny comet grains. During Stardust's long seven-year journey to the comet Wild 2, he had given in to some pessimistic speculation.
"Maybe (the collection tray) wouldn't open properly. Maybe the particles would just smash all the aerogel out of the tray, and we'd come up with nothing at all. Or maybe (the aerogel) would even be covered with gunk from outgassing from the spacecraft," says Zolensky. "We were really worried about that, and got more and more worried as time went by. And so when we opened the tray just two days ago in the lab, we were relieved to find that everything went exactly right."
The scientists estimate they have up to a million comet particles, with a dozen or so that are the thickness of a human hair, and maybe even one that is larger than a millimeter. But it will take some time to know exactly what the aerogel collector tray holds.
Awesome -- good to see a space program so well implemented. The science from this is going to keep a lot of people very busy for a long long time...
And I for one, welcome our new Alien Overlords!
Posted by DaveH at January 21, 2006 9:28 PM