mordant wit

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February 24, 2006

A Solid That's Light as Air
If you wanted to catch a few particles of comet dust speeding through the vacuum of space at 6 kilometers per second -- without damaging or destroying those particles -- how would you do it? Faced with exactly this problem, scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory focused on aerogel -- an extremely lightweight, porous material that is chemically identical to glass, but weighs only a little more than air. Aerogel is the lightest solid known to science. It's also one of the most insulating materials on Earth, the most porous, and it's nearly transparent. Those last two properties made it an ideal choice for catching flecks of comet and interstellar dust on the recently-returned Stardust mission launched by NASA and JPL. # posted by masquerader @ 12:51 ::

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a wanderer,
a searcher,
in a quest
for inner peace