Holiday Greetings

I hope that everyone is having a wonderful holiday — in whatever sense you celebrate this time of year. We took the day off yesterday to enjoy the fruits of the season and be with friends. I did keep an eye on the news to see if the folks in London had heard from the Beagle 2 lander at Mars, and although the news is not good, it appears they’re still hopeful that a signal will be picked up in the next few days. For their sake I hope so. A few years ago I was at JPL for the Mars Polar Lander mission and when that one failed to “phone home” it was a very disappointing experience. You could feel the scientists’ pain at the loss of all their hard work and their hopes for a successful science mission. Mars is turning out to be a difficult target for a variety of reasons, but the things we learn are worth the risks. Still… it’s a sad day when a mission doesn’t work out. So, I have good wishes for the science and engineering teams and hope it comes through for them.

A Pretty Galactic Ornament

NGC 613, courtesy of the European Southern Observatory

Just in time for the holidays, the European Southern Observatory is showing off some of the loveliest galaxy images they’ve taken to date. NGC 613 is a beautiful barred spiral galaxy in the southern constellation Sculptor. If you look closely, you can see dust lanes along the central bar. Astronomers have found starbirth nurseries at either end of the bar, and in the area surrounding the nucleus.

Whenever I see pictures like this, I am reminded again of just how magnificent the cosmos is. I once wrote that galaxies were like cosmic snowflakes, drifting through the universe, no two exactly alike. The more of these kinds of images I see, the more convinced I am that this little bit of poetic license is literally true!

Stardust in Your Eyes

The Stardust Spacecraft encountering Comet Wild artist's conception courtesy The Stardust Mission web page

Tis the season for planetary missions! Mars is in the picture for Christmas and after New Years and Cassini is already sending back great images of Saturn in preparation for its upcoming encounter with the ringed planet. But, little pieces of the solar system like comets and interstellar dust grains are coming in for attention, too. Right after New Years’ Day the Stardust spacecraft will have its turn in the limelight as it encounters Comet Wild 2. The idea behind this mission is to capture tiny grains of interplanetary dust that are caught up in the coma and tail of the comet. Onboard the spacecraft is a tennis-racquet shaped collector with aerogel embedded inside — and this is the stuff that will “capture” the dust grains. While all this is going on, the spacecraft will send back close-up pictures of the comet. Ultimately, the spacecraft will return to Earth in January 2006 and send the collector (safely stored inside a capsule) back to scientists who will test the dust grains to understand their composition and age.

The latest in comet dust-gathering technology: aerogel! The Stardust Mission web page

Actually, Stardust has been collecting particles throughout much of its mission, all in an effort to understand more about what’s populating interplanetary space. The comet particles will also tell us much about the conditions in the solar system at the time the comet formed — back when the Sun and planets were coalescing.