Catching Stardust

The first pieces of the interstellar dust that we're all made of have been captured

In 1999, NASA launched a spacecraft named Stardust on an unprecedented mission to collect grains of cosmic dust from the coma of the comet Wild 2 (pronounced "Vilt 2") at the edge of our solar system, almost 3 billion miles away.

Seven years later, Stardust returned, dropping off a package of the interstellar granules, which scientists believed would contain that primordial material that made up the solar system -- the Sun, the Earth and everything on it, including us -- perfectly preserved in ice for billion of years.

For the next four years, an army of more than 27,000 volunteers from the around the world scanned 71 million images of the cosmic stuff that Stardust collected.

Finally, a Canadian man who spent 15 hours a day on the project hit pay dirt: two specks that represent the first pieces of interstellar dust ever captured.

According to the journal Nature, "The two probable dust particles found so far could mark the beginning of an analysis of what stars and planets really are made of, and also offer a way of charting the chemical evolution of the Milky Way."

"The interstellar dust is fundamentally the stuff we're made of," says Andrew Westphal, a physicist at the University of California at Berkeley who announced the discovery on March 3rd at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference near Houston, Texas.

"We're trying to understand our own origins."

GET INVOLVED

• See images taken by the Stardust team
• See what's in the sky tonight
• Join the Great World Wide Star Count
• Visit NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day Web site
• Download SETI@Home to help in the search for extraterrestrial life
  
• Sign a petition to add the option for US taxpayers to contribute to NASA on the IRS 1040 tax form

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image: NASA