Gathering Stardust of Dusty Stars

It seems that humans have finally embraced the Solar System and their home and are slowly but surely taking ownership and responsibility for it. In what was the first of many such missions, NASA spent a lot of millions of dollars to sweep the outer reaches of the Solar System to clean up the notoriously dusty region. Scientists where extatic at the results:

"It's a huge success. We can see lots of impacts. There are big ones, there are small ones."Professor Brownlee calculated there might be more than a million microscopic specks of dust embedded in Stardust's aerogel collector.

Of course, specks of dust is a tentative start, even if millions where collected. In all likelihood, future missions will be more ambitious and might even deploy a very experimental and high-tech 'Dyson' instrument. Showing once again that Hollywood is far ahead of real scientists, the concept was first illustrated in the cult classic Spaceballs.