Space Dust

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Dr. Mihaly Horanyi and his colleagues at the University of Colorado are on the brink of watching an instrument they developed crash into the moon. It’s okay—it’s designed to. In the meantime, the instrument, LDEX, is measuring impacts from dust particles a fraction of the width of a human hair on NASA’s LADEE mission. It’s measured more than 11,000 of these tiny impacts since falling into orbit in October.

Dr. Mihaly Horanyi and an LDEX prototype. (Photo/Beth Bartel)
Dr. Mihaly Horanyi and an LDEX prototype. (Photo/Beth Bartel)

How On Earth’s Beth Bartel is on her own mission to figure out just what is so interesting about space dust. Think: space colonization, geologic mapping, and searching for signs of extraterrestrial life.

Hosts: Beth Bartel, Joel Parker
Producer: Beth Bartel
Engineer: Joel Parker
Additional Contributions: Jane Palmer
Executive Producer: Joel Parker

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Space Dust – Extended Version

800px-Helkivad_ööpilved_Kuresoo_kohalFor the patient and interested listener, here’s more of How On Earth host Beth Bartel’s conversation about space dust with University of Colorado’s Mihaly Horanyi. We talk about why we should colonize the moon, how Dr. Horanyi got into studying dust in the first place—which is a very interesting Cold-War-era story—how space dust may give us hints about climate change ( via the phenomenon of “night-shining” or noctilucent clouds), and what zodiacal light is.

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