A REMOTE region of Antarctica has yielded what may be the best-preserved comet dust yet found, perhaps in better condition than the samples NASA's Stardust mission brought back from a comet's tail.
A team of meteorite experts led by Jean Duprat of the University of Paris South, France, found the dust in snow collected near Concordia base, 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. "It's the only place on Earth where you've got this number," Duprat says.
Preliminary tests show that some of the particles have a composition close to what one would expect from comet dust. Many of them seem to be in remarkably good condition: fluffy, fragile grains that somehow entered the atmosphere without vaporising or melting. Presumably they arrived slowly, travelling on a similar ...
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