An Immigrant’S Journey into the Cosmos

A Memoir

Astronaut Dr. Buzz Aldrin commended the author citing his proposal to transform the Space Shuttle fleet, before retiring it, into a space tourism fleet, which would generate profits for NASA. Dr. Donald Brownlee Director of NASAs STARDUST Mission that flew to comet Wild 2 said this about the author: One of Dr. Misconi most significant publications was his 1979 Nature paper on streaming of interstellar grains into the solar system. The paper predicted that interstellar dust should stream into the solar system from the direction, the then detectable interstellar gas and it also described the interaction of the extrasolar particles with the solar wind and the IP (Interplanetary) magnetic field. The paper was timely and highly prophetic as the stream of interstellar dust was detected just a few years later by instruments on the Ulysses and Galeleo spacecraft. Dr. Seung Soo Hong, former chair of the Astronomy Department at Seoul National University in Seoul, South Korea, said this about the author: I still remember in one of those brain storming sessions he suggested to fire a big gun from a satellite to a nearby asteroid and to observe the scattered light of the Sun and man-made source by the dust excavated from the asteroid surface. The Space Astronomy Laboratory team couldnt materialize the idea then. But to think back, this was a brilliant idea, with which one can characterize the nature of ligorith particles for a reasonable price.