Word: stardusted
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...Prince remake (thankfully), but another release in the French disco house genre that entered the global consciousness last year with the enormous success of Stardust, Daft Punk, and Bob Sinclar. Cassius comprises ace French producers Boombass and Philippe Zdar, and their experience as DJs (Paris's Respect is Burning; London's Basement Jaxx) and musicians (Motorbass and La Funk Mob) shows. The album's delectable pastiche of 4/4 beats, cut-up vocals and instruments, and funk-tinged deep bass (even the Foxy Brown theme gets sampled) creates some of the most massive tunes to hit the dancefloor, including the storming...
...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...
What's more, the entire mission is coming in at an absurdly cheap (for NASA) $165.6 million. Stardust is part of the space agency's "fast and cheap" Discovery series (Mars Pathfinder with its 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...
...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...
...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...