I read through some of the mission description over at:
http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/science/details.html
...and a highly recommended read it is. However, I might have missed this somewhere, but.... while the aerogel was exposed for collection, was the orientation of the collector allowed to change or was it kept fixed, in relation to the direction of the incoming interstellar material?
As a useful reminder, a previous quote from Anna Butterworth included:
"As to what we are expecting for the real dust tracks: the interstellar dust stream entering our solar system comes from one direction, but we don't know in advance what the exact spread of incident angles will be. Tracks made by interplanetary dust particles in the collector can come from any direction."
[emphasis is my addition][original thread here]
I'm curious to know, when we do begin to find the real-deal interstellar tracks, should we then expect to find all of them in generally the same trajectory (fixed collector orientation) or in random trajectories.
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PS One particularly noteworthy bit of info from the above links, and which might bear some wider repetition, is that [and anyone feel free to refine my paraphrasing]:
according to the team, the stardust is not expected to consist of just one particular type of dust of one particular size.
To explain previous observations, it's thought to very probably vary in several materials and to have various sizes:
So, the interesting stuff might include tracks from all of the following possibilities(and more?):
- maybe some dust of ~0.01 micron size [compare this to the scale on the Focus Movies!]
maybe some of ~0.1 micron
maybe some of ~0.22 micron
maybe some of ~10 microns
maybe some of ~20 microns
and others bigger or smaller?