The wrath of geek

On January 2, a small NASA spacecraft called Stardust flew into a fierce duststorm. Grains moving six times as fast as rifle bullets slammed into it. It's rocket engines struggled to maintain course while a collector, about the size of a tennis racquet, picked up some of the dust.

The duststorm was the coma - the vaporizing "tail" - of a comet called Wild 2. Not only did Stardust fly through that storm and gather up some of that dust, it's going to bring it back to Earth in 2006.

Just so wonderful.

For something even better, go to the link. Look at the picture. Go to the larger version. You're looking at the image of a core of a comet, taken from just 236km (about 150 miles) away. Read the article. Read about "barn-sized boulders, 100-meter high cliffs, and some weird terrain unlike anything we've ever seen before." About Icy spires, as tall as a person, rising out of a crater floor. About a miniworld with gravity of 0.0001-g, where a 200-pound person would weigh less than an ounce. About the ordinary wonders and unexpected amazements found in exploration.

More about Stardust's mission can be found in a BBC item from just before the entry into the coma and an NBC news item just after.

Footnote: Want to go one better? In February, a joint European mission called Rosetta is to be launched. It's goal is to actually land on a comet.

Important note: Just so no one gets the wrong idea, this open enthusiasm for space exploration, cosmology, and astronomy should not be taken as an endorsement of Bush's lamebrained scheme to kill missions with actual scientific intent and benefit (abandoning the Hubble telescope being the most immediately obvious) to divert funds to a showboating "return to the Moon and on to Mars" plan.