{"id":1703,"date":"2004-01-21T08:26:57","date_gmt":"2004-01-21T16:26:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2004\/01\/21\/1703.html"},"modified":"2004-01-21T08:26:57","modified_gmt":"2004-01-21T16:26:57","slug":"aerogel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2004\/01\/21\/aerogel\/","title":{"rendered":"Aerogel"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>I saw the photos of aerogel in the first news stories about the mission to <a href=\"http:\/\/stardust.jpl.nasa.gov\/\">comet Wild 2<\/a>, but I didn't pay much attention.  Now Aaron H. points to a <cite>New York Times<\/cite> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2004\/01\/20\/science\/space\/20GEL.html\">article on aerogel<\/a> that has a bunch of interesting info in it.<\/p>\n<p>Some of the info is goofy: the article claims, for example, that a cube of aerogel is \"[m]ade of 99.6 percent empty space.\"  The <a href=\"http:\/\/stardust.jpl.nasa.gov\/tech\/aerogel.html\">NASA aerogel page<\/a> makes clear that what that meant to say is that aerogel is 99.8% air.<\/p>\n<p>One of the most interesting things mentioned in the <cite>Times<\/cite> article is that it's been around since 1931, but despite its amazing thermoinsulation properties and extremely low density, nobody's done much with it 'til recently.<\/p>\n<p>I'm also intrigued to learn, from NASA's <a href=\"http:\/\/stardust.jpl.nasa.gov\/overview\/faq.html#aerogel\">aerogel FAQ<\/a>, that the stuff has the texture of \"volcanic glass pumice or even a very fine, dry sponge\"; it really looks like it ought to be wet and gel-textured.<\/p>\n<p>But the main reason I'm mentioning all this is to point you to NASA's <a href=\"http:\/\/stardust.jpl.nasa.gov\/photo\/aerogel.html\">aerogel photos<\/a>, which are way cool.  The visual properties of the stuff make pretty much every photo look fake.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I saw the photos of aerogel in the first news stories about the mission to comet Wild 2, but I&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1703","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1703","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1703"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1703\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1703"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1703"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1703"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}