As some of you may know, NASA's "Stardust" re-entered Earth's atmosphere and landed in Utah last night at 1:56 AM carrying dust particles from far-away comets, moons, and other planets. I love aeronautics so my dad and I drove away from the lights of downtown and parked our car near an irrigation ditch just east of Sacramento International Airport. With clear skies ahead of us we waited for the appearence of Stardust. At 1:56 EXACTLY it appeared to the north moving at 28,000 miles per hour. This was the fastest man-made object that has re-entered Earth's atmosphere. No bigger than a washing-machine, Stardust moved across the sky in about 10 seconds. It was also flying above the California-Oregon border, 500 miles away from where we were standing. Two minutes later it deployed it's parachute slowing it down to only 5 m/s. Stardust accumulated 2,000,000,000+ miles on it's journey to Saturn and back, circling the sun three times. Congratulations to NASA and its team to accomplishing this amazing task.

I think this is SOOOOO cool....

It will be very interesting to see what the scientist discover.

Also good to hear about your experience.

Sacramento eh? Them's is my ole stompin' grounds....

I think their going to find HUGOBRAINZ DNA. ;)

All hail HUGOBRAINZ, HUGOBRAINZ IS THE GOD OF PTT !"

Great mission, and it looks like they pulled it off. Trapping comet dust in aerogel is no small feat.

(If you don't know what aerogel is, look it up. Amazing material...it looks like frozen smoke, and nearly floats in air. Fact sheet- http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/aerogel_factsheet.pdf )

Yes, very intresting time to be alive.

Riding energy that travels near the

Speed of C will only let explore our

Little area of this universe, but we

Are head in the right direction. Right now

In the works are plans to create a

Man made black hole. If it works, it

May lead the way to true speace travel.

@Neva

Did u all bring a telescope?

Btw great thread.

Peace

No we didn't have a telescope, but we did have binoculars. It was leaving a pretty little trail behind itself.

Yeah it is a really awesome effort to have pulled this off. Apparently they are going to scan images of the areogel cut into layers so people at home can scan them for particles. A bit like the SETI@home project.
@NEVA - have you ever checked out Gravity Probe B - it recently finished its mission. One of the most high-tech experiments ever done to check einsteins theory that as the earth rotates it drags space and time around with it. Google it - the web site is at stanford university.

@Vash - man - what are you talking about. We are nowhere near making a black hole. What r u smoking man? XD

Very interesting stuff...quite different, though, than the the exhilaration that I experienced, (along with 4 billion other earthlings), back in July of '69, nervously awaiting news of men landing on the moon... I consider it a profound and poignant injustice that Richard Nixon's name is on a plaque on the moon and President Kennedy's name is not. (After losing the presidential election in 1960 and the California governor's race in '62, Nixon had publicly announced his opposition to the goal of landing Americans on the moon and returning them safely to Earth before the end of the decade.)

"We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon, and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard." JFK Nov. 21, 1963 He was killed the next day.

I'm sorry so many of you have not known in your lifetime what it is to be inspired by Leadership. Some of us are old enough to remember.

Last edited: Monday, January 16, 2006 at 11:02:47 AM

Yay. Now we are going to pluto!

^ Not before we take a trip inside Uranus. XD

Lol

Squid

Some good stuff obviously.

There are plans in 2006 at the CERN large hadron collider (by geneva, switzerland)
to construct a particle accelerator.

The LHC will be up and running in the late 2007.

Here they plan to collide protons at near the speed of light, causing the gravity to
greatly increase to a point that it forces quarks inside the protons to coalesce.

This merger may collapse space time and form a minuscule black hole tens of
thousands of times as small as the nucleus of an atom.

I hope they dont let it get out of hand...

But if they do succeed, can u say wrap speed?

Peace

Last edited: Monday, January 16, 2006 at 10:57:48 PM

What makes them think they will be able to control it? Sounds like it could be recipe for disaster to me.

@Vash - cheers for that info. I will check it out - sounds very interesting. And I think you mean warp speed not "wrap" LOL XD !!

@Sqiddy, we can use the Bad Hampsters form psl X to find the Black Hole!! %)

Yes u are correct

Squid

Funny that u caught that but missed;

Intresting (interesting)

Speace (space)

I really suck at typing...

Peace

I'm not sure the exacts on this, but I remember reading that they shot a probe out into space at an exact time so that when Jupiter & Saturn passed each other at their closest passing point, the two planets caused a gravitational pull which slingshot the probe and saved several years of travel time. Crazy stuff!! Makes you wonder how the hell they knew that.

^ Heh. How'd they know that? Well, imagine every nerd on the face of the universe converging in one little room deciding how to make a space ship go faster. You don't work for NASA without a pocket-protector and glasses with duct tape around the middle of the lenses. I wouldn't mind doin' that actually....

Simple gravitational physics... Lots of calculations, but not too bad.

Here's a cute little shockwave game based on orbits-

http://www.bigideafun.com/penguins/arcade/spaced_penguin/default.htm

Last edited: Wednesday, January 18, 2006 at 6:52:40 PM

That must have beeen so cool
wish I was there