Russell Palma is a Minnesota State University professor.
A comet that buzzes Earth every 5.09 years likely left an undiscovered mineral in its wake, and a Minnesota State University professor and student had a hand in its discovery.
Russell Palma, a physics and astronomy professor at MSU, is part of an international team that aimed to fetch space dust fresh off the tail of comet 26P/Grigg-Skjellerup. His student, Jacob Simones, helped analyze some of the data.
Comets can be billions of years old, and many haven't changed much over that span.
"If you can look at really primitive materials, you can get a better picture of what the solar system formed from," Palma said.
But those revelations don't come easy, and this project began when a NASA researcher noticed Earth would pass through the comet's orbit. He hypothesized the comet would shed some debris in the atmosphere.
It's not absolutely clear he was right — no one is 100 percent sure of the dust's origin — but researchers did find in it a mineral never before seen on Earth.
In early 2003, NASA launched a high-flying jet, its wings coated with an oil-like substance to collect the tiny dust particles, into the upper reaches of the atmosphere.
Scientists picked out the space particles, keeping some and mailing some to Palma's Minneapolis lab, one of only a handful in the world that can do this work. It involves handling specs of dust measured in micrometers, or millionths of a meter.
A mass spectrometer, photographed here in Russell Palma's Minneapolis lab, identifies gases by using a magnetic beam to separate them by mass.
Researchers heated the particles until they became gases, then used a mass spectrometer to identify them.
Enter Simones, then an MSU sophomore who spent the summer before his junior year assisting Palma's research. On this project, his main task was to analyze and organize spectrometry data.
He said he has a vague memory that some of the results were strange, not the type of gases one would expect to find in atmospheric dust.
"And that was kind of the end of it," he said.
It was, at least, for Simones.
Meanwhile, Palma presented his results to other researchers.
That "spurred people to keep looking at them (the dust particles) in new ways," Palma said.
NASA researchers, after taking a look at another sample (the original was vaporized) found a mineral of equal parts manganese and silicide, or MnSi.
This is a combination "people would not have predicted" to exist, and one that hasn't been seen on Earth, Palma said.
Photo courtesy Keiko Nakamura-Messenger, NASA
A highly enlarged version of a dust particle believed to come from a comet. The particle includes a mineral that hasn't been seen on Earth. The dust particle is measured here in nanometers, or billionths of a meter.
It was the first news that Simones, now a 22-year-old University of Minnesota graduate student living in St. Paul, had heard about the project since that distant summer.
"It's fun to think that I was there when it was happening," he said.
The real feather in his academic cap would come next summer, though, when he did some independent research as a part of NASA's Stardust project, also in the Minneapolis lab. Stardust was NASA's second effort to collect dust from a comet (the new element was collected during its first such endeavor, about a year before Stardust's 2004 mission).
Simones published some of that work in the prestigious academic journal Science.
As for that new mineral, it was named Brownleeite earlier this summer, for Donald E. Brownlee, a professor of astronomy at the University of Washington in Seattle and a pioneer in the field of space dust.
It was the 4,324th mineral certified by the International Mineralogical Association and the 11th of 25 new minerals certified so far in 2008.
Email this article | Permanent link | Topstories news | Topstories news archives
