(UPDATED*) Lots of ink for Stardust probe’s gatherings from the primeval galactic forge

If one finishes a long highway drive and has to clean splatter off the windshield it is no surprise. But if a little flier’s residue is found flattened on the rear window – and the drive included no tornadoes – the thought has to occur: That’s gotta’ve been one fast bug.

   Something like that just made big news. Not about bugs, but about space dust that a NASA probe brought back eight years ago by parachute to Utah. It has looped through the solar system for years, its sample paddle facing toward its direction of travel while covering about 3 billion miles including a close cometary flyby. With the help of droves of public volunteers, scrupulous examination of collectors on the back of the probe now reveal a few motes that seem to have overtaken the machine, called Stardust, from the rear. Those’ve gotta’ve been some fast dust particles – just like the imagination says might be racing through the solar system borne by an interstellar wind with velocity too high for orbit of the sun. Plus, their marks indicated hypervelocity impact. Any that hit the front would presumably be swamped by myriad hits from the main quarry of the mission, comet material and other interplanetary solar system bits.

   One of the side-reasons it has been rewarding to be a tracker for the last eight years is the chance to see how short news can be summarized while freed of need to include much detail including numbers and names. One has hoped that readers who want more will open a few of the news stories that are the point of this exercise. Or read a press release, as  in Grist below.

   News coverage of this, propelled by a snappy UC Berkeley release, other releases, and a paper in Science, was huge. There is duplication and much churnalism out there that merely rehashes the press handouts. But  Google News says it sees 204 articles on the topic. Yahoo News shows 48 (such a big difference stumps me). Bing gets 5,110!, but it appears to include a lot of stories filed before the big swarm of them this week. It’s a bunch any way you count it. As for huge, the paper has more than five dozen named authors and 30,714 unnamed authors lumped as the “Stardust@home dusters”.

   Incidentally, I have not seen any stories from it, but this could have been a story last March. The results were unveiled at the 45th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Texas in some detail, if this abstract and paper on line is any indication. This was encountered by nosing around for this week’s coverage.

   This is, unfortunately, an easy enough story to write. It is easy not just because it comes with press releases but that not much new science has yet come in. It is an exotic mission and a successful run of careful sifting of its sample bag. It is not science to bring home a scarce animal, but it is to pick its corpse apart and declare in a new journal that it is the first of its species known. Ditto, these seven dust motes have gotten a once-over including as reported in Science. A large batch of more detailed reports is nearing publication in the journal Meteoritics and Planetary Science (which will probably get very little news coverage).

     Sample Stories:

• Universe Today – Elizabeth Howell: How a Comet-chasing Spacecraft ‘Likely’ Brought Insterstellar Dust Back To Earth ; One quote, also in press release. No outside experts reaction.
• SF Chronicle – David Perlman: Scientists report first analysis of ‘precious’ space particles ; An original quote from the local, UC Berkeley head of the analysis team and, in a rather brief account, Perlman outlines how the team split up the analysis task.
• *Double UPDATE : LA Times – Amina Khan (correx inadvertent credit to Deborah Netburn): Scientists think they have dust specks from outside our solar system ; Many apologies, saw this immediately and somehow forgot to include it. Good story, outside expert’s words of praise, and gee-whiz lede: “Call them the seven wonders of interstellar space:…”
• New Scientist – Rachel Ehrenberg: Stardust team reveals first specks of interstellar dust ; Very nice. A minor transgression in this – the implied certainty up top that the interstellar nature of these things is established fact. But huzzah, the estimable Ehrenberg got hold of people outside the research team for comment. And anyway she does hedge down deeper on whether researchers can be positive of the dust’s origin.
• Space.com – Charles Q. Choi: NASA Probe May Have Caught Dust from Interstellar Space, a First ; Long, clear, and detailed. Cannot tell if any of the sources are from outside the research team but he even gets some quotes in from the ‘duster’ public volunteer mote seekers.
• San Jose Mercury News (via Santa Cruz sentinel) Lisa Krieger: Star dust taken from comet tail excites scientists ; Hmmm. Hed seems misleading. The collector, while in the comet tail, did have its backside facing the direction of the interstellar wind. But the bits caught on that side were not part of the tail. They were passing through. NIcely written with info apparently all from press release and press conference.
• Discovery News – Irene Klotz: Interstellar Dust discovered Inside NASA Spacecraft ;
• Science Magazine ScienceShot – Eric Hand: Seven grains of interstellar dust reveal their secrets ; Oh shoot, thought I had unveiled something original – that this was all released into the open earlier this year at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. Hand reports that as well.
• Daily Mail (UK) Ellie Zolfagharifard – Scientists capture space dust from OUTSIDE the solar system – and it could reveal how galaxies evolve ; Yes it is the Mail yet this is not a bad job at all. The usual great illus from this outlet is there, but no overdone fluff and nonsense. The writer even contacted a local expert (which led to a search for a related press release, the one in Grist below from the Natural History Museum). No outside experts sought, apparently, but solid and useful reporting.

  Grist for the Mill: NASA/JPL Press Release ; UC Berkeley Press release ; Lawrence Berkeley Lab Press Release ; Natural History Museum, London, Press Release ;