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!)

You can see the NASA broadcast now…. (t – 4 minutes and holding)

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

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.

-cvj

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

“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….)

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.)