Scientist at the Vostok Antarctic station are to gather dust from the comet ISON, which was disintegrated by the sun in late November 2013. They hope their luck will help them find the “basic building blocks” of life.
The Russian scientists manning the station will take three attempts to harvest space dust. The first will be between Tuesday and Wednesday this week, then again between Friday and Saturday, and also sometime in late January, Sergey Bulat from St. Petersburg Institute of Nuclear Physics, told RIA Novosti.
Bulat and his colleagues initially scheduled their dust hunt for December, when the comet was expected to pass Earth on its way back into outer space after grazing the sun. But its destruction called for a change of plan.
“We expected the comet to survive and hoped to gather some large particulates in December. Now if we get something, it would be particulates from the coma [the major part of the head of a comet] and tail left when it was approaching the sun,” he explained.
Dust gathering is done in the Antarctic because the air over the polar continent is cleaner compared to more inhabited locations. The scientists will use five 150-square meter polyethylene canvases as traps.
Each trap will be unrolled nor far from the station and left in the hope that some comet particulates would fall on it. Then they will be preserved in chemically inert argon gas and shipped to St. Petersburg for microscopic study, which will start in May.
“We are most interested in particulates several micrometers in size, which didn’t burn in the atmosphere and descended slowly. The fact that they did not experience heating is what makes them valuable,” Bulat said.
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