Don’t forget that at 5:12am ET on Sunday, the Stardust “comet hunter” returns to earth. The event will be viewable on NASA TV, and do remember to keep your fingers crossed for good luck and a safe landing in Utah….
It should be rather exciting!
There are several resources (such as the artist’s impression that I borrowed) on NASA’s website. Quote from the site:
The Stardust spacecraft was launched on February 7, 1999, from Cape Canaveral Air Station, Florida, aboard a Delta II rocket. The primary goal of Stardust is to collect dust and carbon-based samples during its closest encounter with Comet Wild 2 – pronounced “Vilt 2″ after the name of its Swiss discoverer – is a rendezvous scheduled to take place in January 2004, after nearly four years of space travel.
Additionally, the Stardust spacecraft will bring back samples of interstellar dust, including recently discovered dust streaming into our Solar System from the direction of Sagittarius. These materials are believed to consist of ancient pre-solar interstellar grains and nebular that include remnants from the formation of the Solar System. Analysis of such fascinating celestial specks is expected to yield important insights into the evolution of the Sun its planets and possibly even the origin of life itself.
As I’m a hopeless romantic, I’ll end with one of my favourite Hoagy Carmichael melodies, entitled “Stardust”. I’ve been known to play it on trumpet, but I’ll spare you a clip of that and give you a link to the man himself singing it, here. Some of the lyrics, by Mitchell Parish:
Stardust (Carmichael-Parish)
Sometimes I wonder why I spend
The lonely nights
Dreaming of a song
That melody haunts my reverie
And I am once again with you
When our love was new
And each kiss an inspiration
Ah, but that was long ago
Now my consolation
Is in the stardust of a songBeside a garden wall
Where stars are bright
You are in my arms
That nightingale tells its fairy tale
of paradise where roses grew
Though I dream in vain
In my heart it will remain
my stardust melody
The memory of love’s refrain.Ah, but that was long ago
Now my consolation
Is in the stardust of a songBeside a garden wall
Where stars are bright
You are in my arms
That nightingale tells its fairy tale
of paradise where roses grew
Though I dream in vain
In my heart it will remain
my stardust melody
The memory of love’s refrain.
-cvj
January 14th, 2006 at 12:55 pm
If Not A Space Agency were run like a business,
Googel Images
aerogel 3460 hits
they’d be selling samples of the stuff small, medium, and large. Ya gotta have some spooky aerogel! United Nuclear has reasonably priced superhyperultra death magnets,
http://www.unitednuclear.com/magnets.htm
50% down the page
Alas, how does one assemble a Halbach array?
Let’s hope NASA didn’t mount the chute deployment accelerometers upside-down this time. Paint the round socket red so the round red end fits into the round red socket, as opposed to the blue square other end – and don’t hire color-blind male retards. Social advocacy is for Management hires. (Sorry – NASA. Ion plate titanium nitride vs. gold vacuum deposition. Yeah, that’ll Mil-Spec tell the ends apart.)
January 14th, 2006 at 12:58 pm
I like this next particular Stardust song celebration of comet Wild (pronounced “Vilt”), adapted by Mark Gingrich on sci.astro in 1999 when Stardust launched:
(Sung to the 1960s tune _Wild Thing_, by The Troggs)
“Vilt” thing,
We’ll make your dust cling.
You make this aerogel filthy.
I said “Vilt” thing.
“Vilt” thing, we think you’re dusty.
But we wanna know for sure.
Are your particulates Brownlee?
Oooh, you’re dusty.
“Vilt” thing,
We’ll make your dust cling.
You make this aerogel filthy.
I said “Vilt” thing.
“Vilt” thing, we think you’re icy.
But we wanna know for sure.
Does your dust hold volatiles?
Brrrr, you’re icy.
To learn about cosmic dust, I invite the readers to the Wikipedia cosmic dust entry (especially if you have some time on your hands to help me with some polishing/editing….)
January 14th, 2006 at 1:06 pm
Uncle Al, the switch for Stardust accel. was designed to be right-side up and mounted that way (unlike Genesis which tried to reuse the Stardust design upside-down, I think?)
January 14th, 2006 at 2:06 pm
It’s wonderful how renaming supernova fallout as “stardust” makes it sound exciting, magical, adventurous, even romantic. Somehow I suspect it will turn out to be dust, similar to meteors…
January 14th, 2006 at 2:44 pm
#4 Science:
>It’s wonderful how renaming supernova fallout as “stardust”
This is not an accurate statement. Supernovae didn’t make very much of the interstellar dust. The dust was mostly formed before by a variety of different post main sequence stars in their outer envelopes. When a pre-supernova star makes dust, the supernova event mostly pushes it out.
From Gehrz’s chapter (pg 447) of the IAU #135 Interstellar Dust book: “Types of Dust Grains in Stellar Outflows”.
Stellar Type Input to Interstellar Medium, Relative to all Stars
M Stars (Miras) 35%
RLOH/IR stars 32%
Carbon stars 20%
Supernovae 8%
M supergiants 4%
Wolf-Rayet stars 0.5%
Planetary Nebulae 0.2%
Novae 0.1%
RV Tauri stars 0.02%
O,B stars 0
>Somehow I suspect it will turn out to be dust, similar to meteors…
I am having a hard time making sense of this statement! Present locations of cosmic dust, and the dusts’ origin are usually different. There exists a ~30 year long debate of which is the dominant contributor to our solar system’s zodiacal cloud: asteroids or comets. Other sources contribute dust in the solar system too: interstellar dust (from outside of the solar system), Kuiper belt objects, the Jovian dust streams, the Saturn dust streams, beta-meteoroids..
Some References (my popular science cosmic dust writings) to help:
Dusty Phenonomena in the Solar System (Sky and Telescope)
Cosmic Dust and its Evolution
The Dusty Trail From the Solar Nebula to the Earth
Wikipedia Cosmic Dust
January 15th, 2006 at 4:31 am
You can tune in to to
NASA TV now to see preparations for, and (we hope) the re-entry of the capsule.
January 15th, 2006 at 5:12 am
Woo Hoo!!! It landed *safely* in the Utah desert!!
January 16th, 2006 at 2:06 am
Amara:- Thanks for the report. This is where I first learned that it went ok…!
-cvj
January 16th, 2006 at 6:26 am
Clifford: You’re welcome, but you should thank NASA’s media coverage. Their NASA TV interface over the Web was excellent, so I could watch the whole thing from my computer at home.
My only nonpositive comment about the NASA TV coverage was statements made by Don Yeomans (JPL): “We wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for comets..”
Debateable, under study, not proven! I wish he didn’t say it because the media over here jumped on it, and made it a large aspect of their reports.
January 16th, 2006 at 12:17 pm
Here’s some more appropriate lyrics, especially the chorus:
Woodstock by Joni Mitchell (1969)
I came upon a child of god
He was walking along the road
And I asked him, where are you going
And this he told me
I’m going on down to yasgur’s farm
I’m going to join in a rock ‘n’ roll band
I’m going to camp out on the land
I’m going to try an’ get my soul free
We are stardust
We are golden
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden
Then can I walk beside you
I have come here to lose the smog
And I feel to be a cog in something turning
Well maybe it is just the time of year
Or maybe it’s the time of man
I don’t know who l am
But you know life is for learning
We are stardust
We are golden
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden
By the time we got to woodstock
We were half a million strong
And everywhere there was song and celebration
And I dreamed I saw the bombers
Riding shotgun in the sky
And they were turning into butterflies
Above our nation
We are stardust
Billion year old carbon
We are golden
Caught in the devil’s bargain
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden
January 16th, 2006 at 1:51 pm
Hi Amara, thanks for those references on stardust, of course is very interesting for many reasons and your articles are enlightening. I was joking a little bit …
January 17th, 2006 at 2:03 pm
Eyeballs wanted: http://stardustathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/index.html
January 17th, 2006 at 2:19 pm
And you can follow this dust instrument too: the Student Dust Counter built by the students at the University of Colorado is sitting on the launch pad at the Kennedy Space Flight Center, as we speak, waiting for the launch of the Pluto New Horizons mission.
You can see the NASA broadcast now…. (t – 4 minutes and holding)
January 17th, 2006 at 7:28 pm
The comenet material will be analyzed at SLAC! (and elsewhere too, of course.) In mid-March our own Sean Brennan of the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lab will bounce photons off the microscopic comet dust to identify the composite elements and minerals.
January 18th, 2006 at 1:45 pm
>The comenet material will be analyzed at SLAC! (and elsewhere too, of course.)
I seem to recall a kind of competition between laboratories to ‘win’ the right to analyze some of those pieces. The analyzing laboratories needed to satisfy a number of rigorous requirements. In Italy, some of the Stardust (I don’t know which: the interstellar or comet Wild2) dust particles will go to the excellent dust lab at the Capodimonte Naples Observatory, which is located a little south of me.
You can try to view the capsule via the
web cam!
I have not seen a list of all of the Stardust laboratories, but at the
“Dust in the Solar System” meeting last September, a full day was devoted to presentations by people at laboratories who described their Stardust dust analyses procedures. (A conference proceedings book is in preparation from that meeting).
(I hope that these links work!)
January 19th, 2006 at 2:09 pm
Pluto New Horizons successfully launched !