Word: cometed
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...spectral magnificence, the tail of a comet is about as close as you can get to nothing at all, a banner of dust so tenuous that a cubic mile's worth wouldn't fill a shoebox. Yet that near nothingness holds many secrets. Comets are leftovers from the creation of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago; they also delivered organic chemicals and water--the crucial building blocks of life--to the young Earth. Scientists would love, therefore, to get a bit of comet into the lab for analysis...
...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...
...robot rover was another). Like Pathfinder (and unlike the instrument-packed billion-dollar probes of the 1970s and '80s), Stardust is as stripped down as it can be. The 848-lb. spacecraft carries just solar panels, a camera, a radio, a spectrometer to analyze sunlight bouncing off the comet, a few sensors and the all-important sample-collecting system...
...Aaron touches the Nile with his staff, and it turns to blood. Egypt is then infested successively by frogs, gnats, flies, a pestilence on livestock, boils on people and beasts, hail, locusts and "a darkness that can be touched." Scientific skeptics have assigned them myriad natural explanations, including a comet and a volcanic eruption on the Mediterranean island of Santorini. The most ingenious effort is an ecological domino theory proposed in the 1950s by a scholar named Greta Hort: the Nile's many tributaries flood, infesting the great river with blood-red soil from the high plateaus and reddish micro...
...fact that the meteorite exists at all, says Kyte, also strongly suggests that it came from an asteroid, not from a comet, as many scientists still believe. He notes that comets strike the earth at such high speeds--many of them well over 100,000 m.p.h.--that they are usually completely melted and vaporized. But a typical asteroid hits at less than half that speed, and some fragments often survive. So why did this one turn up 5,400 miles away from the Yucatan impact site? Kyte believes it was flung by the explosion high above the atmosphere...