Briefing on Stardust Results

by | Mar 7, 2006 | Interstellar Medium, Outer Solar System | 1 comment

A number of readers have been asking about results from the Stardust mission, particularly as pertains to any interstellar materials returned by the craft. We’ll know a good deal more on March 13, when NASA holds a news conference at 3 PM EST (1800 GMT). The briefing will be available both on the Web and on NASA TV, with participation by, among others, principal investigator Donald Brownlee and JPL’s Peter Tsou. My understanding is that the team will largely confine its report to cometary samples, but these too may yield surprises.

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1 Comment

  1. ljk on February 23, 2007 at 10:18

    Astrophysics, abstract
    astro-ph/0702601

    From: Edward M. Drobyshevski [view email]

    Date: Thu, 22 Feb 2007 14:24:08 GMT (136kb)

    Stardust findings favor not only the planetary origin of comets but the underlying close-binary cosmogony of the Solar system as well

    Authors: Edward M. Drobyshevski

    Comments: 14 pages

    We analyze findings of the Stardust mission that brought to the Earth dust from the 81P/Wild 2 coma. Just as the data of the Deep Impact mission to 9P/Tempel 1, they are at odds with the widely accepted condensation/sublimation comet paradigm. They fit rather well to the approach assuming ejection of nuclei of short-period comets from moon-like bodies of the type of Galilean satellites in rare (six to seven events in 4.5 aeons) global explosions of their massive icy envelopes saturated by 2H2+O2, products of the electrolysis of ice. This approach offers an explanation, in particular, for the jet activity of comets, which is sustained by combustion of the 2H2+O2+organics mixture ignited and complemented by the solar radiation. Combustion accounts also for other observations, in particular, the presence in the dust of products of high-temperature (800-900 K) metamorphism. The presence of minerals forming at still higher temperatures (~1400-2000 K), just as the undoubtedly planetary origin of some long-period comets arriving from the joint planeto-cometary cloud beyond Neptune, forces one, however, to invoke the close-binary cosmogony of the Solar system, which three decades ago predicted the existence of such a cloud (in the recent decade, this prediction has been substantiated by the discovery there of many dwarf planets). It considers the Jupiter-Sun system as the limiting case of a binary star and uses it as a basis for explanation of all the known observations and for prediction of the new ones to come. It provides an explanation, in particular, for both the origin and capture by the Earth of the Moon as a high-temperature condensate and the formation of the Galilean satellites, which also contain inclusions of refractory minerals in their ices.

    http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0702601

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In Centauri Dreams, Paul Gilster looks at peer-reviewed research on deep space exploration, with an eye toward interstellar possibilities. For many years this site coordinated its efforts with the Tau Zero Foundation. It now serves as an independent forum for deep space news and ideas. In the logo above, the leftmost star is Alpha Centauri, a triple system closer than any other star, and a primary target for early interstellar probes. To its right is Beta Centauri (not a part of the Alpha Centauri system), with Beta, Gamma, Delta and Epsilon Crucis, stars in the Southern Cross, visible at the far right (image courtesy of Marco Lorenzi).

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