Any BABLoggees in the US northwest, near the southeast corner of Adams County? There are reports of a meteorite fall there this morning. If you saw anything, chime in!

Also, you can report it to the International Meteor Organization, which can aid in triangulating the fall and maybe finding the meteorite.

Tip o’ the Whipple shield to BABLoggee Measure for letting me know.

Wanna do some science at home in your pajamas?

I’ve written quite a bit about Stardust, a NASA mission that collected dust from a comet and brought it back to Earth. The dust was captured using a foam called aerogel, and scientists took a lot of images of the gel, so they could search for the interplanetary dust particles. The dust leaves tracks in the gel, as show in the image above.

It’s too big a job for a small team of scientists, so they started the Stardust@Home project, where you, the public, can help the search. You go through a short training session online so you can see how the procedure works, and then you can start searching! 115,000 people pre-registered for this, and they can always use more eyes.

The fun begins at 11:00 a.m. Pacific time TODAY, in just ten minutes as I write this, when they release the data. If you’re interested, sign up! You might be the one to find a tiny speck of outer space right here on Earth.

I attended a talk yesterday by Don Brownlee, who is the head guy on the Stardust mission (which brought back samples from a comet: see here, and here and here). Stardust returned comet particles to Earth several months ago, and scientists all over the planet have been eagerly looking at them, investigating their chemical and atomic structure. They’re looking to see what kind of environment the particles formed in (and therefore where the comet formed), where they’ve spent their time, maybe even if they came from our solar system or an entirely different one.

I was sitting off to one side, so the perspective on this image is a little odd. What Dr. Brownlee is showing there are three images of a particle from the comet. The big image is a microphotograph of a piece of LICE forsterite. I don’t know what LICE stands for, and a google search didn’t turn anything up (though I have to admit it’s weird that some web pages out there have discussions of both forsterite and head lice on them). Forsterite is a mineral that you wouldn’t think twice about finding on Earth, but finding it on a comet is very, very odd: it’s made in hot environments, like 2000 Celsius hot.

That’s really weird because comets are cold. They have lots of ice in them, and spend most of their time in deep space. If you put comets someplace hot, they evaporate pretty quickly (which is why they form tails when they get near the Sun). So how could they have minerals in them that formed at high temperatures? Is James McCanney right?

Actually, one possible solution isn’t hard to imagine. When the solar system was young, and planets and comets still forming from a disk of gas and dust, the Sun was fairly active. We see young stars shooting long jets of matter out from their poles due to magnetic forces. This transports material formed near the surface of the Sun to the outer solar system, where comets form. So in fact you might expect to see some high-temperature minerals in comets… if you had thought of it first. I have not heard of anyone predicting that, which is too bad. They’d be pretty hot stuff right now if they had!

Hot stuff. Oh man, I crack myself up.

Anyway, Dr. Brownlee pointed out another neat thing. The image on the upper right in the picture above is an extremely high-magnification zoom of the particle. That grid-like structure you see is not some photographic effect: it’s the actual crystal structure of the particle itself. You’re seeing rows of atoms lined up like soldiers on parade in the crystal.

Think on that for a moment: before the telescope (and really, even after it for some time), we had to observe comets with our eyes, and the smallest feature we could hope to see on a comet was the size of the Earth. Since the actual physical object forming the comet is at most a few kilometers across, this was hopelessly coarse resolution.

But now we have samples of comets, and can examine them in our labs. We can see individual atoms in the comet! According to Dr. Brownlee, this represents, roughly, an increase of 17 orders of magnitude in our resolving power: 100,000,000,000,000,000 times, 100 quadrillion times!

That’s not too bad. I’d love to see a day when that sort of power is brought to bear on the other objects in our solar system. There’s still so much to learn!

Just a quick note: I will be interviewed for three hours on Coast to Coast AM with George Noory tonight. The show starts at 10:00 11:00 p.m. Pacific time Saturday night, and runs until 2:00 a.m. Saturday night/Sunday morning Sunday night/Monday morning. We’ll be talking about a lot of the topics I’ve written about here: NASA, George Deutsch, Saturn, WMAP, the SpaceX launch failure, Stardust, and certainly the new Mars orbiter– I’ll have a longish blog entry up about that tonight by the time the show airs.

Many radio stations stream the show, so take a look at the affiliate list to see which ones do. I’m pretty sure the Canadian station CFUN does, for example.

Update (10:47 Pacific): Launch is now scheduled for 19:00 UT (11:00 Pacific). There are low clouds at 6000 feet interfering with the launch.

Live webcam of the Pluto New Horizons launch:

OK, so here we go again. High winds stopped the first try, and a power outage in Maryland stopped the second.

But New Horizons is still on the pad, waiting to launch. The window for launch opens at 18:08 Universal time (10:08 a.m. Pacific) and runs until 20:07 UT (12:07 Pacific).

The links you want:

• The launch info is at Kennedy Space Center.
• NASA TV has a live view.
• The New Horizons Pluto mission website.

In other news, the Stardust folks had a press conference this morning, but it was at 8:00 my time, when I had to take the Little Astronomer to school. I only saw the last few minutes, but clearly the team is very pleased with how things went. If anyone saw it, then feel free to chat in the comments section.

The Stardust sample container has been shipped to Johnson Space Center. When they cracked it open to look at the samples, they got a nice surprise.

“It exceeds all expectations,” said Donald Brownlee, a University of Washington astronomy professor who is principal investigator, or lead scientist, for Stardust. “It’s a huge success. We can see lots of impacts. There are big ones, there are small ones.”

Yay! It’s nice to know such a bold mission was a success. Brownlee estimates there may be more than a million particles trapped in the aerogel, which will yield a scientific bonanza about comets.

Incidentally, well over 60,000 people have signed up for studying the images of the aerogel through the Stardust@Home project.

I just found out I’ll be giving a talk near Johnson in March (see the blog sidebar), and I wonder if I can wrangle a little trip to see the clean room where these guys will be stored…? That would be very, very cool, and only karmic since I missed the re-entry.

So here you are waiting for the second attempt to launch New Horizons, and you’re sick of waiting. You’ve watched the steam vent from the side of the rocket, waiting for the winds to die down, you’ve chewed your nails, you’ve answered all your email. Now you’re just wishing for something to bide the time.

What a coincidence! I have about a hundred backlogged entries for this blog which consist of nothing but a title and a link. So instead of wondering when I’m gonna write them out into full entries, I’ll clear out the backlog and just post a few as one liners. These should keep you happy until launch control lights that candle to Pluto.

• My old friend and editor for Sky and Telescope magazine Bob Naeye answered the call by Spiked online ‘zine, which asked, "If you could teach the world just one thing, what would it be"? Bob, ever thoughtful, chose to teach people the scientific method. For an editor, he writes real good.
• Skepticism… in Kansas? Yup. Red State Rabble is a blog by a guy who lives in Kansas, and to the point, has two kids in the Kansas public school system. Not surprisingly, he is concerned about the increasingly anti-scientific direction the schools are headed in that state.
• I was perusing the Minor Planet Mailing List a while back, and read a post by a guy who found a comet whose orbit just kisses that of Saturn. That’s pretty unusual, but you can see it for yourself.
• If you listened to me talk about Stardust on the Paul Harris Show, then go over to the Australian Skeptics’ site and peruse the Skeptic Tank, a collection of fun podcasts.
• Take a look at Nasa’s website for flying robots that will assist future astronauts.
• Hey, what’s happening on Mars right now?

OK, that oughta hold ya for a while. But keep an eye on NASA Pluto webcam. You don’t want to miss the launch while you’re out surfing.