Stardust Comet Mission Reports New Kind of Organics

"A portion of the organic material in the samples is unlike anything seen before in extraterrestrial materials."

- Scott Sandford, NASA's Ames Research Center

Special "needles" mounted on micro-manipulators controlled by computer to carefully and precisely cut out sections of aerogel that contain cometary samples. Image courtesy NASA.

Also see 120106 Earthfiles report about Deep Impact study of Comet Tempel I.

December 15, 2006 Pasadena, California - NASA reports that scientists have found a new class of organics in comet dust captured from comet Wild 2 in 2004 by NASA's Stardust spacecraft. [ See December 15, 2006 issue of Science Express online. ]

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