© RIA Novosti / V. Chistiakov.
Traffic signs at the Vostok Soviet Antarctic research station in the vicinity of the South Geomagnetic Pole.
Traffic signs at the Vostok Soviet Antarctic research station in the vicinity of the South Geomagnetic Pole.
Scientist at the Vostok Antarctic station are to gather dust from the comet ISON, which was disintegrated by the sun in late November 2013. They hope their luck will help them find the "basic building blocks" of life.
The Russian scientists manning the station will take three attempts to harvest space dust. The first will be between Tuesday and Wednesday this week, then again between Friday and Saturday, and also sometime in late January, Sergey Bulat from St. Petersburg Institute of Nuclear Physics, told RIA Novosti.
Bulat and his colleagues initially scheduled their dust hunt for December, when the comet was expected to pass Earth on its way back into outer space after grazing the sun. But its destruction called for a change of plan.
"We expected the comet to survive and hoped to gather some large particulates in December. Now if we get something, it would be particulates from the coma [the major part of the head of a comet] and tail left when it was approaching the sun," he explained.
Comment: Forget "finding the basic building blocks of life", the "building blocks" are raining down on above our heads!
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