Universe

I'm totally impressed and happy that NASA's Stardust mission was a success. The little capsule that was designed to catch bits of "dust" from the tail of comet Wild 2, was launched seven years ago. Finally, five days ago it returned to earth with its payload intact!

The spacecraft "Stardust" traveled 3 billion miles during it's trip with an average speed of 48,000 mph. The craft captured less than one-thousandth of an ounce of dust that consists of leftover materials that formed the planets over 4.5 billion years ago (or 6000 years ago if you take the Christian Bible literally).

One of the really amazing things about the spacecraft "Stardust" is that it is the fastest recoverable spacecraft reentry. "Stardust" reentered the Earth's atmosphere at 28,000 mph.

Yesterday (Jan 19, 2006), NASA scientists confirmed that thousands of particles were returned by the spacecraft "Stardust" and Dr. Donald Brownlee said "The collection of cometary particles has exceeded our expectations."

Congratulations to NASA on this successful mission. I'm eager to hear about what they learned from the dust samples.

I happened upon an interesting and decidedly scholarly weblog today. The site is called Terra Nova. In general, it's about being a "collaborative weblog experiment...about an emerging social phenomenon called 'virtual worlds' -- computer-generated, persistent, immersive, and representational social platforms". The description of the site sounds academic and exhaustive because the site actually is.

What brought me to it in the first place was their article about the Economics of FFXI. In the article, two Wharton undergrad honors students are mentioned and a link is provided to their report on FFXI economics. Interestingly enough they expose some problems with the economy. The author of the Terra Nova article (Dan Hunter) speculates that developers of virtual worlds will soon have to pay more attention to their economic systems to stop economic savants from "taking them for all their worth".

The report is pretty hardcore so don't expect it to be light reading. The Terra Nova blog is accessible and if you play MMORPGs at all, much of what they blog will hit home.