From The Chronicle of Higher Education

The Road From Dissertation to Book Has a New Pothole: the Internet

Libraries' digital open-access rules make some editors wary of buying graduate students' work, although others see a marketing boost

John A. Bowersmith for The Chronicle


Unless junior scholars limit online access to their work, says Ann Hawkins, she won't consider it for publication. A professor of English at Texas Tech, she edits a book series for an academic press.


By Jennifer Howard

Ann R. Hawkins, a professor of English at Texas Tech University, likes the idea of sharing research, but she's worried that sharing has gone too far when it comes to students' dissertations.


Not long ago, Ms. Hawkins heard from a junior scholar who wanted her to consider his revised dissertation for a series she edits for Pickering & Chatto, an academic press. She liked the idea—until she discovered his work was fully accessible on the Internet. Few would buy the specialized book, she worried, if much of its contents was already freely available.

"The problem I have is when anyone can either find the dissertation immediately on Google or by going to the university page and just clicking it and downloading it, whether they are in the United States or Taiwan," Ms. Hawkins says. Unless he could limit access, she told the hopeful author, she wouldn't consider it for the series.


That is not what any author wants to hear, but it's especially alarming for scholars at the beginning of their publishing careers. With jobs scarce, the pressure to produce a monograph that enhances their credentials is intense in many humanities and social-sciences fields. But more institutions now require master's and Ph.D. candidates to submit work in electronic form, and it appears that the rules could make publishing—and job-hunting—even harder, at least in some cases.


The digital push is being driven by an understandable desire to make scholarship, some of it supported by public money, easily available. And bits and bytes don't take up shelf space in cramped libraries the way bound dissertations do. But several series editors and publishers echo Hawkins's concerns. "If authors have an opt-out option, I would recommend that they do opt out, at least until their first book is published," says Ann Donahue, a senior editor at Ashgate Publishing Group, which puts out a number of books that began life as dissertations. (There is a similar set of issues around journal articles.)

Others, though, take the opposite view: Digital dissertations stand a better chance of getting published because, if a work is viewed or downloaded many times, that can signal there's a readership for it. It's an issue "with more angles than a geometry textbook," says Patrick Alexander, director of Penn State University Press, in an e-mail.


Staying Offline


Brandon D. Shuler, now a Ph.D. candidate in the program of literature, social justice, and environment at Texas Tech, had his own moment of authorial vertigo brought on by a requirement that he submit his graduate work digitally. He holds a master's degree from the University of Texas Pan-American and just published a heavily revised version of his thesis, on the work of a Texas outdoorsman and writer, with a university press.


Mr. Shuler thought he had successfully navigated Pan American's thesis rules, which mandate using a digital repository but did—like the rules at many institutions—allow him to embargo his work for a limited period of time. He thought he had done that. "They can publish it automatically unless you go through this Barnum & Bailey, Ringling Brothers, three-ring circus of hoops," he says. "Then my publisher calls me and asks me if I'd had my thesis electronically published." His editor had stumbled on a copy of the work online and had jitters about its being readily available.

Mr. Shuler had to get in touch directly with ProQuest, the electronic publisher with which the vast majority of U.S. universities contract to house digital copies of dissertations, and get the company to restrict access. According to Mr. Shuler, the process took about a month. "I'm working on my Ph.D.," he says. "I really didn't have time to be doing all this, but obviously with a book coming out, I had to get it done."


ProQuest says it follows each institution's and author's instructions about how much of the work to make available (full text or abstract only, for instance), and on what schedule (immediately available, embargoed for a period of time, etc.). "We are the university's partner in dissemination," says Austin McLean, the company's director of scholarly communication and dissertations publishing. "We go by what the universities require. We have a highly customized embargo option for universities."


At the University of Illinois, the ProQuest agreement is one of the few areas that graduate students have had problems with since the university put into effect its new digital-repository policy, says Rebecca Bryant, assistant dean of the graduate college. Illinois receives about 1,200 master's and doctoral theses every year, she says, and no longer accepts paper copies. The digital documents are deposited in the university's repository, known as Ideals, as well as with ProQuest, which means that the student must also sign ProQuest's publishing agreement. "It's confusing to students, quite frankly, that they are basically asked to enter into two publishing agreements," Ms. Bryant says.


She adds that "there are still great benefits to using ProQuest"—having one's work listed in the major professional databases, for instance.


At Illinois, the default option is that work will go open access after two years; students may request an extension, although requests for a permanent embargo have to go through a special petition process. Since 2009, according to Ms. Bryant, 63 percent of graduate students have opted to make their work open access, about 20 percent have chosen campus-only access, and about 17 percent have chosen to keep their work off-limits altogether for now.


Publishing Dilemma


In the United States and beyond, there's a push for more coordination of practices and standards in this area. The Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations has been working since the 1990s to promote "the adoption, creation, use, dissemination, and preservation of electronic theses and dissertations," according to the group's Web site. Statewide ETD (for electronic dissertations and theses) groups exist, and in May, the newly created U.S. Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Association will hold its first conference.

Having clear standards and policies may help students understand and navigate their degree and graduation requirements, but it is not going to settle the question of whether ETD's help or hurt their publishing chances. One publisher that views those chances as diminished by the digital availability of student work is Texas A&M University Press.


The press has become "much more reluctant to consider works based on dissertations than in the past," says its director, Charles Backus. In an e-mail, he described his concern that online dissertations might cut into sales: The press has come to assume that "most libraries and library vendors will not buy or recommend purchase of ensuing books that are based substantially on them," he wrote.


Ms. Donohue, of Ashgate Publishing, says she and her colleagues have similar concerns. The publisher does not yet have a firm policy in place regarding digital dissertations but has been thinking hard about the potential risks in recent months.


From Ms. Donohue's perspective, work that's behind a firewall of some sort doesn't really pose a threat. "We're really interested in the kind of open access where the dissertations turn up easily on a Google search," she says.


Other scholarly publishers, however, see no need to worry. Jim McCoy, who directs the University of Iowa Press, which publishes a mix of fiction and nonfiction books, views open access as an opportunity. "Any dissertation that's on the Internet and has taken on a life of its own, that would be a selling point to me," Mr. McCoy says. "That would mean there's a market out there for this material, and there could be an even greater market" for a revised, edited, well-marketed version published by a scholarly press.

The novelist and short-story writer Sara Pritchard also has an optimistic view of open access and dissertations. In 2007 she was working as the marketing director for West Virginia University Press when it decided to publish Bringing Down the Mountains, by Shirley Stewart Burns. The book was based on her history Ph.D. dissertation on coal mining. The document was in the university's repository, and a lot of people were looking at it. "We thought it was a good sign that her electronic dissertation was receiving so many hits (Shirley pointed this out to us) and that it boded well for sales of her book," Ms. Pritchard said in an e-mail. "And her book has sold extremely well (used primarily as a textbook on mountaintop-removal coal mining—which is a big controversy)."


The creative-writing community, whose graduate students tend to be keenly focused on publishing, has had particular concerns about ETD's. Ms. Pritchard's own career offers evidence that putting creative work in a digital repository doesn't necessarily get in the way of publishing it. She holds a master of fine arts degree from West Virginia and published a version of her M.F.A. thesis, a short-story collection, with Houghton Mifflin, just making sure to keep the thesis embargoed until the commercial book came out.


Mr. Alexander, the Penn State press director, says that for many presses, the decision becomes easier—and more likely to go the author's way—when the proposed book differs significantly from the graduate-school version. "The more crucial question for us, especially in the case of a dissertation, is whether the author can explain the extent to which and how the submission differs from the original version," he said via e-mail. A work written to satisfy a graduate committee should probably look very different from a book meant for a somewhat wider audience. That was true long before electronic repositories, and it holds true for dissertations in any format.


When scholars can show that they've reworked their projects with that in mind, Mr. Alexander expects that most university presses will remain open to considering their work. "The best advice I could give students ... is to remember that books and dissertations are two distinct species," he said.




It is interesting that several of the "we won't publish it" crowd represent very specialized series from very high-priced publishers. These are exactly the kinds of works that should be put on the web freely because there is an insufficient market for them. Even libraries have cut back a lot on these kinds of works and will be cutting a lot more in the current environment. Few individuals (except the independently wealthy) are buying any of these books. If the budding scholars actually want their works to be read, they should welcome free electronic publication.


Iif they substantially revise and rework their dissertation, it should still be publishable. Dissertations are written for committees according to arcane rules, not for readers. Presses that publish unrevised or lightly revised dissertations are doing a service to none.

Northern Illinois University English Department's literary journal, Style, requires all accepted essays to remain embargoed from free Net publication for one year AFTER publication. In that way, we still maintain a subscription base, but at the same time allow relatively open access for those interested in reviewing earlier scholarship. Open access is not necessarily a completely positive direction for scholars in the humanities, as witness the article above.


I see a lot of assumptions here by the press editors that don't seem to be based on any evidence. Has anyone done any kind of survey of acquisitions librarians to determine if anyone is actually bothering to Google search individual book titles to find a free copy out there before ordering a paid copy? I don't have time for that, and I've never heard of any other librarians who do either. We might do that for journals, which represent substantial forward-going commitment to a subscription, but not for individual books, which are one-off purchases, unless the book is extraordinarily expensive (typically, reference handbooks). Further, more and more book purchases are starting to follow the model of journals, and be bundled in packages (especially ebook packages) rather than be made as individual title decisions.


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blendedlibrarian 5 hours ago






Thank you for providing the story about "Bringing Down the Mountain". Let's not ignore the dissertation authors whose research has been discovered by scholars via a Google Scholar search, leading to invitations to present, submit to a journal or even potential employment? Prior to the Internet pothole and open publishing of dissertations and theses, such discoveries would be far less likely to happen. Mbelvadi also makes a good point. I select in the field of education at my library, and I've never declined to purchase a book simply because it was already freely available in dissertation form (no, I don't even check). I expect, as Mr. Alexander points out, that the university press is going to significantly edit and revamp the dissertation into a much better and valued publication. I would also like to know how many university presses will actually turn the dissertation of an unknown scholar into a monograph. Can they afford to take that risk?


I addressed this question in "Dissertations into Books? The Lack of Logic in the System" (Against the Grain, April 2007), which can be found at Penn State Press's web site here: http://www.psupress.org/news/S... There, pace "mbelvadi," I provided the evidence of librarians refusing to purchase books based on dissertations. They do so simply by instructing vendors like Yankee Book Peddler to look for evidence (in the book's Acknowledgments, e.g., or in ProQuest's database by author/title) that the book originated as a dissertation and they then exclude such books from inclusion in their approval plans. Estimates of the effects on sales vary, with reductions ranging from 20% to 40%. I examined the titles in Latin American studies published by Penn State Press, when I was director there (1989-2009), and found a difference in average sale between books based on dissertations and those not so based at the lower end of this range. So there is a demonstrable effect. The problem was even worse, no doubt, when ProQuest had an agreement with Amazon to sell dissertations; I understand that this will begin again soon. It is because of this effect that we initiated the practice at Penn State of asking every author of a revised dissertation to explain in detail the differences between dissertation and book. While those differences are often very substantial indeed, unfortunately librarians who control approval plans do not have access to this information and therefore do not act upon it; it suffices for them that the author did write a dissertation on the subject to exclude it from the approval plan. Knowing of this practice by librarians, which is "rational" from their point of view, editors for publishers "rationally" decide not to consider books based on dissertations for publication. Yet tenure committees continue, "rationally" from their standpoint, to require a book or two for award of tenure. Such subsystem-level rationality adds up to systemic dysfunctionality, which can only be repaired by intervention from top administrators, which sadly has not been forthcoming. As the date on my article indicates, this is not a new problem; the origins of it go back at least a decade.---Sandy Thatcher




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Electrowetting by Jordan Richman for Today in Science

Electrowetting Creates the Miniature Liquid Lens

It is easy to miniaturize cellphones and hand-held computers that have built-in cameras, but to get these cameras to focus and zoom requires tiny moving parts that are costly and wear out quickly from friction. As a result of this cost factor, most miniature cameras have a fixed-focus glass or plastic lens. A new experimental liquid lens, however, can change its shape and thereby its focus through the low cost of a very small electronic charge. Instead of numerous small parts, all it needs is a tiny battery to produce a near zero charge to change its focal length.
Electrowetting is the process whereby the liquid lens changes the curvature of its surface to form a flexible lens.
A lens is a device, usually made of glass or plastic, for either concentrating or diverging rays of light. It is usually formed from a piece of shaped glass or plastic, but other substances have been used to form lenses. Magnifying glasses, eyeglasses, contact lenses, microscopes, telescopes and cameras are just some of the many objects that require the use of lenses.
The lens has two curved surfaces. The type of curvature of its surfaces will determine the kind of jobs it does. Like a prism, a lens works by refracting or bending the light that passes through it.
Lens are classified by the curvature of these two surfaces. A convex lens bulges out from its center, A concave lens bulges inward towards its center. A flat surface is caled a plano lens. If the curvatures of both surfaces are equal it is a meniscus lens
The kind of lens used determines the distance necessary to bring the object into focus. That distance is called its focal length which is determined its refractive index.
The value of the focal length f for a particular lens can be calculated from a lensmaker's equation.
The focal length f is positive for converging lenses (convex), negative for diverging lenses (concave), and infinite for meniscus lenses. The value 1/f is known as the power of the lens. Since meniscus lenses are equal on both surfaces they neither magnify nor diminish the object.
Philips Research has developed a liquid lens for a miniature camera through the use of a process known as electrowetting, that is the passing of an electric current over the surface of two fluid bodies.
As an experimental laboratory process, electrowetting (applying an electrical current to fluid surfaces) has been studied as a curiosity for about forty years. Even before formal experiments were conducted on electrowetting, scientists were concerned about what happens when two opposite forces such as electricity and water were combined. People are warned not to go swimming when it is raining because lightning hitting the water could electrocute them. Benjamin Franklin discovered electricity with his kite and key but took precautions to avoid the rain when he made those tests. He chose a cloudy, not rainy day. The major effect of water on an electric current is to short circuit it, but that problem is overcome in electrowetting experiments mainly by using very small amounts of fluids in mixtures.
Electrowetting is a process that controls the way a nonmixable fluid mixture changes its surface tension. The effect of passing an electric current across the surface of a fluid mixture that contains a water solvent fluid at one end and a hydrophobic fluid (non-water combing fluid) that has difficulty mixing with water at the other end, like oil, is to change the surface tension where the two fluids meet (its meniscus) from convex to concave.
This effect takes place because the electric current reduces the hydrophobia (water aversion) of the nonwater mixing fluid. The surface tension of the meniscus (point where the two fluids meet, changes from convex, plano, to concave thus altering the focal length of the object. The miniature camera can now zoom in and out of objects.
[Without the electrical charge, the surface of the liquid would always be a fixed convex curve. When the charge is applied through the electrodes, however, the reduced surface tension forces the droplet lens to undergo quick changes from a convex to a flat and to a concave lens depending on the amount of current which is passed through the fluids.]
The above bracketed lines could be the text for a captioned diagram.)
[Amy: Here if possible there are several diagrams showing the two tubes of Philips' FluidFocus lens with the fluids in them to explain how the electric current changes the shape of the fluid lens.]
Philips liquid lens takes up hardly any electric battery power. It is extremely fast in switching its focus to a wide range of focal lengths. The durability of the lens is also very high. Philips tested it over a million operations without any loss of its optical power. It is shock resistant and can operate over a wide temperature range. The absence of moving mechanical parts eliminates friction and cost consuming wear and tear problems that smaller cameras have.
It will be interesting for the commercial future of the liquid lens to see the outcome of the patent claims made by another company, Varioptics, against Philips' decision to present its liquid lens. Varioptics contests Philips' development of the liquid lens by announcing its international patents on a single-element focusing lens. They claim that since the 1940s their optical engineers have been working on a lens that could focus without moving parts and that they already hold patents for a liquid lens that changes it shape from convex to concave using the process of electrowetting.
Electrowetting is also being used to develop a new video display technology. Using what is called "electronic paper" the process of electrowetting (applying electrical charges to fluid surfaces) can be used to form a video display that may some day be used for computer video monitors. As in the case of using electrowetting for the liquid lens, Royal Philips Electronics is at the forefront of using electrowetting for developing electronic paper.
The liquid lens may only be a year or so away from the market, but the idea of electronic paper video displays is believed to be at least five years from a usable product form.
Even so, Peter Kurstjens, general manager of Electronic Ink Displays at Philips points out that, "while the amount of information that we digitally process ever increases, more printers are sold each year. This contrast goes to show we still prefer reading from paper rather than from electronic displays,"
Printing and paper distribution are the mostly costly parts of information distribution. If it were as easy to read monitor displays as it is to read a paper book the cost savings of information retrieval could be enormous. Reading from a video display is difficult because it reflects light unlike paper's absorption of light. Despite all the technological hurdles ahead of e-paper, (electronic paper) large companies see the economical potential of e-paper displays.










.

Harvard Researchers Create High Performance Optical Nanowires

Jordan Richman, 2/25/04
Using a $20 Bunsen burner and some silica optical fiber (little pieces of glass), Dr. Limin Tong, a visiting professor at Harvard from China, describes in a recent paper published in the December 18 issue of the journal Nature, how he was able to make a 50 nanometer, high performance light transmitting nanowire. First he heats the fiber and draws it out to a 1 micron wide wire. He then winds the wire around a the tip of a heated sapphire needle. Since sapphire is such a good conductor of heat, its heat softens the glass fiber evenly as Dr. Tong draws out the fiber down the shaft of the sapphire needle.
"If you pull fast, it is very thin," said Dr. Tong. He found that if he pulled more slowly he could produce a thicker wire.
Dr. Eric Mazur who led the Harvard optical nanowire research team pointed out that while much thinner nanowires have been produced in the past by other scientists none of them had the even diameters or smoothness exhibited by Dr. Tong's nanowires. The sidewall of the earlier wires were rough and there were unwanted variations in their width. The wires produced by Tong and Mazur are very smooth and offer much less optical loss for either visible and infrared light.
"These wires show surface smoothness at the atomic level, along with uniformity of diameter," Dr. Mazur said.
Even though Tong's and Mazur's optical nanowires are much thinner than even the wavelengths of their transported light, they are still able to guide a light beam with a high degree of accuracy and a minimum of optical signal loss. When light passes through a conventional fiber optic it flows through it like water in a garden hose. Nanowires do not hold the light. They act instead like guide rails for light waves which are much wider than the nanowires. The light surrounds the tiny nanowire as evanescent waves. "Evanescent coupling" occurs when two of the wires touch. Unlike fiber optics where the light is fixed within the filament, coupling causes an exchange of light waves when two of the wires touch. Larger evanescent fields can be produced by varying combinations of nanowires which may applied for the production of smaller and more effective sensor technology. For many sensor devices, especially in medicine, size is of critical importance. Sensors could detect many toxins, for example, at once and with greater precision and accuracy with these new smaller diameter nanowires packed into the same area of a sensor.
Despite their width of only 50 nanometers, these new nanowires are still barely visible since they have a 2 centimeter length. They are able to curl into tiny light conducting loops with remarkable tensile strength. They are as much as five times stronger than spider silk. Their resiliency and flexibility, along with their beadlike structure, have been cited as qualities that may make them play a role in the manufacture of new electronic chips that use on and off optical signals. Reducing the size of the nanowires diameter to less than 50 nanometers probably would not increase their effectiveness in transporting light waves, but the flexibility of Tong/Mazur nanowires introduces many new options in modern electronic engineering. The nanowires can be tied into tiny knots making the alignment of optical components much easier to accomplish.
"It's like the old TV's, where we used to have flexible wires to go from one board to another, " said Dr. Richard Osgood, a professor of electrical engineering and applied physics at Columbia University. "You don't have to get everything exactly aligned to close things."
Dr. Mazur points out that these nanowires are not the same as conventional fiber optic cables that circumnavigate the globe but could be used for distances that range at about an inch. They would be useful for devices that use fiber optics and light signals as low-loss interfaces which would provide further compact design and speed for those processors. Fiber optic cables, which are about the size of a human hair, combine phone messages and then have to separate them. The combiners are called multiplexers and the signal separators are demultiplexers. The new nanowires may one day become part of these processing modes in telecommunications.
End
Notes for Amy Perry
1) Tong, Mazur, and Osgood quotes are all from the NYT's clipping you sent. There is an inked in date at the bottom of the clipping: NYT G8 1/29/04 and the authors E-mail: Eisenberg:nytimes.com (Anne Eisenberg)
For the lead illustration I recommend the one showing Tong's fabrication of his nanowire using the sapphire taper and Bunsen burner since it is not the smallness of the width that was his innovation but the refinement of the nanowires smoothness of surface and and even diameter that he accomplished with his Bunsen burner and sapphire needle.
Showing the nanowire on top of a human hair and the nanowire tied as a knot making a loop are other illustrations that could be used.

ALLERGY

Pollens are the most common cause of Allergy leading to allergic rhinitis. The popular name for rhinitis, "hay fever,"
a term used since the 1830s, is inaccurate.
The condition is not caused by hay nor does it lead to fever. Every season throughout the world, pollens from grasses, trees, and weeds produce the allergic reactions of sneezing, runnynose, swollen nasal tissues, headaches, blocked sinuses, and watery, irritated eyes.
Of the 46 million allergy sufferers in the
United States, about 25 million have rhinitis.
Dust and the house dust mite represent another major source of allergens. While the mite itself is too large to be inhaled, its faeces is about the size of pollen grains and can lead to allergic rhinitis. Other types of allergy can be traced to the fur ofanimals and pets, food, drugs, insect bites, and skin contact with chemical substances or odors.

In the United States there are about 12 million people who are allergic to these substances. In some cases an allergic reaction to an insect sting or drug reaction can cause sudden death, or a serious asthma attack can be brought on by seasonal rhinitis or some other irritating substance.
In the United States there are about 9 million cases of asthma, a disease which is related to allergy.

Jordan P. Richman, Ph.D.


Encyclopedia of Science, Gale Research

The Rosetta Mission by Jordan Richman, Ph.D.

The Rosetta Mission



Launched on March 2, 2004, from Kourou, French Guiana, by the European Space Agency (ESA), a spacecraft designed to fulfill the goals of the Rosetta Mission is set to send a lander to hitch a ride on a comet ten years later (2014). It will study the comet for two years before it launches its lander. Then in 2014 it releases its 220-pound lander, called Philae, which will ride the comet for a year as it travels past Jupiter and flies by the sun.


In the first phase of the project, in order to overcome the effects of gravity, it will circle Earth and Mars three times in March 2005, November 2007, and November 2009. From 2008 to 2009 it will begin to pass through two asteroid belts where it will study the asteroids, Steins and Lutetia. From 2011 to 2013 it begins to reach its maximum orbit, 540 million miles from the sun, and then shuts down its engines. In this phase it studies the comet's coma (the principal part of most comets consisting of a diffuse cloud of gas and dust which surrounds the nucleus) until November 2014 when it delivers its lander.


The technique used to land Philae on the comet Chury and keep it in place for its perilous ride on a comet's back is remarkable. As soon as it touches down, two harpoons will anchor the probe to the surface. A self-adjusting landing gear will then keep it upright even if it is on a slope. The lander's feet will then drill into the ground. All these manuevers are designed to help the lander deal with the low gravity found on comets.


The International Rosetta Mission was approved in November 1993 by ESA. Originally it was set to meet Comet 46p/Wirtanen but after a delay in the launch time it was reset to meet comet 67p/ Churyumo-Gerasimenko (Chury). Studying the two asteroids is also one of Rosetta mission's secondary objectives. It will gather images of these rocks and learn more about their composition, subsurface temperature, and surrounding gas and dust.


The mission takes its name from the Rosetta Stone which was used to decipher Egyptian Hieroglyphics. Just as this stone helped to teach Egyptologists more about ancient Egyptian history, so the Rosetta Mission's probe should help astronomers decipher the history of the solar system as well as the underlying forces that govern planetary systems in relation to their stars.


The lander is called "Philae" after the obelisk that helped decode the Rosetta Stones . If the Rosetta Mission succeeds it will be:


the first to land on a comet;


the first to fly to Jupiter on solar power alone;


the first to fly alongside a comet and orbit its nucleus;


the first to analyze a comet's composition from its surface;


and the first to see a comet transform from a rock to a hot ball of gas and dust.


In February 1999, NASA launched a spacecraft named Stardust which gathered information from comet Wild 2. Since Stardust's launch it has traveled 4 billion kilometers (2.5 billion miles), looping through the inner solar system three times before arriving at Wild 2. It swung by Earth in January 2001 and in November 2002 came close to the asteroid Annefrank, as a kind of test run for its encounter with Wild 2. It then took pictures while scientists studied and modified its orbit.






Then on January 2, 2004, the Stardust spacecraft flew by Comet Wild 2 scooping up grains of dust and ice from the comet's tail. It came within 230 kilometers (143 miles) of the comet's 5.5-kilometer-wide (3.4-mile-wide) core, the closest approach ever to a comet by a spacecraft.If its mission is successful, the craft will return with the first sample ever taken directly from a comet.


Stardust also captured 72 detailed pictures of Wild 2's core, about one every ten seconds, as it swung by. The pictures showed dust and gas venting from various cracks and openings in the core, forming a tail, as in most comets. But the photographs also revealed Wild 2's surface to be strewn with craters, pockmarks and sinkholes. Scientists were shocked by the varied terrain, which was far different from the surface of the comets Halley and Borrelly pictured by othe spacecraft.


As comets approach the Sun they heat up and begin to boil, leaving a trail of dust, ice and other particles in their wake. Stardust flew through this, scooping some of these particles from behind its heavy shields with an outstretched net shaped like a tennis-racket. About an ounce of material was caught in a compound called aerogel, a spongy silicon. Stardust is due to drop these samples back to Earth by parachute in January 2006. The heat-protected package should land near an air force base in the Utah desert.


Scientists are eager to study this material. Comets are assumed to have formed at the outer edges of the solar system and, except when their orbits have brought them close to the Sun, to have remained frozen since then. They assume the dust Stardust captured has remained unchanged since our solar system formed 4.6 billion years ago. Studying this dust could reveal conditions during that period. Some scientists think a torrent of comets may have seeded Earth with water and organic molecules essential to the planet's evolution in its first 500 million years.


Other than moon rocks, this will be the first material from outer space that scientists have brought back for study. Meteorites from Mars and more distant reaches of the solar system have landed on Earth, but they all passed through Earth's atmosphere, heating up so much that their chemical composition could have been changed


Stardust is the fifth spacecraft to have met up with a comet. In 1985, the International Cometary Explorer zoomed by Comet Giacobini-Zimmer, and one year later, the Giotto and Vega spacecraft had their rendevous with Comet Halley.


The comet Chury will have Philae on it until it becomes a fireball. It reaches its perihelion (the nearest distance of a comet's orbit to the sun) in October 2015. Rosetta monitors the comet with its hitchhiker until the mission ends in December of 2015.


Jordan P. Richman, Ph.D.


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