Word: aerogel
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Artist Yi Zhou's latest sculpture has all the trappings of a Cold War - era secret, so she's appropriately mum about the details of its creation. What she will say is that it took help from NASA scientists to shape her medium, a translucent substance called aerogel, into a likeness of a human heart. For the Shanghai-born artist, the absorbent material - used aboard NASA's Stardust probe to trap dust from comet tails - represented a new artistic frontier. Cajoling some from the space agency took years. "I had to show them I was serious," she says...
...will be hard to top the aerogel heart, but Zhou has a few exciting projects lined up, including a short film featuring Charlie's Angels actress Lucy Liu ("It's her first time working with an artist," Zhou says with some pride) and a fountain that she's making out of a Ferrari. Presumably the car was easier to come by than a supply of space...
...substance called aerogel, invented in the 1930s but recently refined by NASA, has been certified as the lightest solid in the world--yes, it's in the Guinness Book of World Records. Weighing in at a mere .00011 lbs. per cu. in. (thin air weighs about .00004 lbs. per cu. in.), aerogel resembles smoke that has been frozen into place--it's cloudy, translucent and virtually weightless. It's also surprisingly tough. Chemically similar to glass, aerogel is used on the space shuttle to trap tiny spaceborne particles traveling at high speed so they can be brought back to Earth...
...switched to aerogel, an ultra-lightweight glass foam that's 99.8% air. It resembles nothing so much as solidified smoke. The aerogel is packed into a collector that resembles a circular ice-cube tray about a foot across. En route to Wild 2, one side will trap dust that's wafting in from beyond the solar system--another item of great interest to astronomers--and once there, it will flip to scoop up comet dust...
...will be smaller than the width of a human hair, but they expect to have it down by 2006. They may not have the luxury of a pure sample: a perfect seal would have been too expensive, which leaves a remote chance that some earthly dust could contaminate the aerogel on re-entry, making analysis more complicated...
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