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Re: (meteorobs) Stardust
Robert Gardner wrote:
> Lew Gramer's report of the stardust mission reminds me of a talk given
> at the Astronomy Colloquium at Cal Tech some years ago. As you must be
> aware some portion of a meteor ends up as dust that ultimately settles
> to earth. I forget exactly how the speaker was collecting and
> identifying the meteoric dust but he described one experimental project
> he had one of his student performing. She had a child's wading pool full
> of water on top of one of the taller buildings. She would periodically
> collect the sediment from the pool.
In the British Meteor Society of the 1970s, Phil Bagnall organised a
programme of collection of rainwater to measure the flux of
micrometeoroids. I was never convinced that much of the solid
material collected was extraterrestrial. If I remember correctly,
magnets were used to find iron meteorites, and the dust inspected
under a microscope. Living in rural England I never found any, and
suspected those that did, captured particles from local sources like
power stations.
> However at some point her
> experiment was terminated prematurely when a janitor discovered her pool
> and thinking it trash disposed of it.
Don't you just hate it when that happens.
> remember that at least in one of the slides he projected, there were
> perfect black sphericals. I am sorry that at that time I did not take
There was an article in a UK magazine with photographs. It might have
been "Popular Astronomy" or "Hermes" as it used to be called. They're
in storage in the UK, so I can't check.
Malcolm
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