Word: collector
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Mellon, an avid collector of art who had previously donated an extensive amount of money to the National Art Gallery in Washington, D.C., founded the museum with a 1966 donation, according to the Yale Daily News. Mellon's generous donation carries the condition that the museum will never charge admission...
...looks as though they will. On Feb. 6 a remarkable space probe called Stardust is scheduled to take off for a January 2004 encounter with Comet Wild (pronounced Vilt) 2. With a tennis racquet-size collector, Stardust will snatch dust particles from the comet's tail as it flies by and then, in an audacious interplanetary maneuver, return to parachute its precious cargo to Earth two years later...
...other instruments had to be light, but the collector had to be ingenious. Although the probe will loop two times around the sun to help it match orbits with the comet, Stardust and Wild 2 will still shoot past each other at nearly 4 miles per second, 10 times as fast as a speeding bullet. In order to catch dust particles without disintegrating them, Jet Propulsion Lab engineer Peter Tsou first thought of making a trap out of Styrofoam; he figured dust would bury itself harmlessly inside. Unfortunately, says Tsou, "cosmic dust particles are so small that on Styrofoam...
...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...
...Stardust makes it back safely, the collector, nestled in a sample-return capsule, will drop into the atmosphere and parachute to ground on the salt flats of central Utah. The scientists haven't quite perfected their techniques for extracting the particles, some of which 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...