Official News - page 7

REAL LIFE NEWS: COMET DUST FOUND IN ANTARCTIC SNOW

There was much excitement when NASA's Stardust mission brought back samples of material from a comet's tail. Now scientists have found comet dust that may be even better preserved than the Stardust samples - in a remote region of Antarctica.

A team of meteorite experts found the dust in snow collected high on the Antarctic plateau. When they melted the snow and filtered out anything more than 25 micrometres across, almost a third of the particles they found were from space. Preliminary tests show that some of the particles have the kind of composition that would be expected if they were dust from a comet.

The particles seem to be in remarkably good condition. The fluffy, fragile grains have somehow managed to enter the Earth's atmosphere without melting or vaporising, perhaps by arriving slowly, travelling on a similar orbit to Earth's.

Comets are thought to have changed very little over the last 4 billion years, so examining the dust grains to find out more about their composition, and comparing them to those brought back by the Stardust mission, should yield clues to the origins of the Solar System.

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