Science megablast: Comets may have brought xenon to Earth Scientists working on the European Space Agency’s Rosetta probe mission have found xenon on Comet 67P – a discovery that introduces a link between the cosmic rock and Earth for the first time. The Rosetta spacecraft was launched in 2004, and its companion lander unit, Philae, arrived at the comet a decade later. Both were …
Well obviously - The PC version never reproduced the soundtrack well!
(Though on PC press F7 instead of Enter at the graphic mode selection screen, and then press i in game to toggle invincibility. Without that, I would never have seen the gorgeous artwork past level 2!)
For me it was a different cheat that let me see the whole thing. I found where the prices of upgrades were stored and set them to zero. Now I originally thought this would just make sure I could buy whatever was available at each shop. However it seems that what was available at each shop was based on price, so by zeroing the prices I'd enabled myself to get a fully armed ship from the first shop.
At first, and from the description, I thought you shirely meant "Ur-Xenon". (I am of an age having read German science articles in, y'no, German)
But 'U-Xenon' appears to be something different again from article's description. U-Xenon aka U-Xe is the four isotopes that can be generated by fission of uranium. Pu-Xenon / Pu-Xe from plutonium.
What the paywalled article might have been talking about is the opportunity to derive the evolution of xenon isotope abundances, using to captured U-Xe/Pu-Xe in zircons of 4Gya, as opposed to later atmospheric proportions, and then back-tracking to see if posited original proportions match those primordial as supposedly preserved in the comet.
Or something like that... (sure wish science wasn't paywalled)
Edit: found another summary article at Phys.org. But why am I suspicious that author says 'silicon' when I'm thinking 'zircon'. Sure wish science wasn't unsurely interpreted....
We need to stop publishing these articles!
If we don't, Jeff Bezos is going to read about useful things being delivered by comet, and he's going to upgrade the Amazon drone program. Given he's already building Blue Origin, this could mean a cometary capture mission in as little as a decade. Then even Bruce Willis won't be able to save us!
I don't get it.
Was that a legitimate query, a rhetorical question, or maybe an example of British humour (not to be confused with humor. Where humour employs the word funny as in "does that smell funny to you", humor employs the word funny as in "that was so funny I'll need to visit the hospital for stitches after rupturing my spleen from laughing so hard")?
Earth is tiny. Comets are generally small, Hale Bopp is more than 60km in diameter, insignificant compared to earth at 12,742km or even Pluto (2,374km), but its tail extends 500 million km. As orbits the sun, it comes into constant contact with all kinds of debris such as randomly floating junk and stuff left behind by meteors and comets. Gravity sucks them in and they become part of Earth.
Earth doesn't need to be provided with anything any more than your car needs to squash a bug on its windshield. But sometimes it appears we get lucky and manage to gather a few useful items such as something we believe may have helped spark life... which of course happened in originally in England... where Jesus was born and lived... and blessed the queen... and also was the geometric center of the universe... and as such must be protected by aliens of all forms... which is why Theresa May will now secure cameras in your bedrooms and bathrooms for your own protection. After all, this article says that someone or something in space is trying to invade your country with particles and possibly life forming gasses that are believed to be a primordial source of dangerous terrorists.
I guess it would of course be better if we had only British produced Xenon 67P in our atmosphere in the future :) Of course, the British version would be 69P because it's just worth more and it's damn sexy too!
Earth has 800,000 cubic miles of Uranium and 1.2 million cube miles of Thorium under extreme temperatures, pressures and particle bombardment conditions that defy our silly terrestrial 'daughter atom' limitations. Earth wasn't stocked by comets, more cartoon science.
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