Hacker News Reader

Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

Is most dust from soot though?

Dust is composed of things like pollen, dirt, tiny particles of sand, dried plant material, and so forth. There is plenty of outdoor dust that is natural.

I have an incredibly hard time seeing how an outdoor IKEA roof, with tons of shoppers in their cars and delivery trucks and whatnot, is going to be some kind of pristine collection area.

View on HN

I have to imagine there were still other particles, but there numbers were lower enough to make the space particles findable.

It’s the difference between finding a needle in a haystack and a needle on a kitchen table with 10 pieces of hay strewn on it.

I'm guessing the bottleneck lies in surface area to effectively collect samples rather than the effort to inspect samples and processing them to determine origin. The roof is going to have contaminants, sure, but so is any other collection area. Using a magnet to get iron based particulate then picking out rocks with unique elements is likely a lot cheaper than a purpose built facility to collect micrometeoroid samples with reduced contamination

Yeah it was the fact that they could power wash the roof clean and then use it as a collection mechanism, and it was high enough to be isolated from other sources of dust.

I think this is the same amateur astronomer I was reading about: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/september-30-2018-1.4312266/...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com