The Taste of Alien Dust

The Cassini spacecraft is the size of a school bus and is loaded with all kinds of detectors to analyze the mighty planet Saturn, its atmosphere, moons, rings, and environment. Apropos of that last bit, one instrument, the Cosmic Dust Analyzer, was designed to let tiny grains of matter slam into it, so it can analyze their composition, mass, and even how fast they were going. The CDA has sampled millions of dust particles that have flown into its maw, mostly ice and silicates originating from th...