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NASA Study Finds New Kind of Organics in Stardust Mission
A team of scientists found a new class of organics in comet dust captured from comet Wild 2 in 2004 by NASA's Stardust spacecraft.
The discovery is described in a technical paper, "Organics Captured from Comet Wild 2 by the Stardust Spacecraft," in the Dec. 15 issue of Science Express, the online edition of the journal Science.
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Special 'needles' mounted on micro-manipulators controlled by computer to carefully and precisely cut out sections of aerogel that contain cometary samples. Courtesy: NASA |
In January 2004, the Stardust spacecraft flew through comet dust and captured specks of it in a very light, low-density substance called aerogel. Stardust's return capsule parachuted to the Utah Test and Training Range on Jan. 15, 2006, after a seven-year mission. The science canister containing the comet particles and interstellar dust particles arrived at Johnson Space Center on Jan. 17. From there, the cometary samples have been processed and distributed to about 150 scientists worldwide who are using a variety of techniques to determine the properties of the cometary grains.
"A portion of the organic material in the samples is unlike anything seen before in extraterrestrial materials," said Scott Sandford, the study's lead author and a scientist from NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley. "Capturing the particles in aerogel was a little bit like collecting BBs by shooting them into Styrofoam."
The comet organics collected by the Stardust spacecraft are more "primitive" than those seen in meteorites and may have formed by processes in nebulae, either in space clouds between the stars, or in the disk-shaped cloud of gas and dust from which our solar system formed, the study's authors found.
"Comets are a major source of the water and carbon on the moon," said S. Pete Worden, NASA Ames director. "Therefore, understanding comets will help scientists learn what natural resources to search for on our nearest neighbor in space -- resources that will aid astronauts in exploration beyond Earth," Worden explained.
