Stardust Touching Down This Weekend
In our absence from doing anything remotely fun outdoors thanks to this city's attempts to break some 1953 record, we've retreated into full-blown science geekery. After Jared Diamond's Science Series lecture last night left us wanting in the science geek department, we're now on the edge of our seats as NASA's Stardust mission--a collector of dust and ice from the tails of comets--is scheduled to touch down Sunday at a military post outside Salt Lake City, UT. We're still trying to bribe members of our family in SLC to get as close as possible and snap some pictures.
The re-entry of Stardust is the Super Bowl of astronomy, except that an event like this doesn't happen every year. In fact, the last time an expedition to space brought back bonafide space goodies was 30 years ago when Apollo 17 returned bearing moon rocks. (Seattlest has personally laid eyes on some of those moon rocks; dad is a geologist who at the time was doing research involving, well, moon rocks. We'll spare you the lengthy reminiscence about how this sparked our curious young mind to be obsessed with space and science ever since.)
Even more exciting is the fact that the primary researcher for this project, Don Brownlee, is a UW professor of astronomy--that space dust is coming to Seattle. The Seattle Times currently is running an enjoyable piece profiling Dr. Brownlee, do go read it. We hope to make a plea to professor Brownlee to let us see the space dust, to complete our personal nerd Ring Cycle, from moon rocks as a child to space dust now.
