The mineral, a manganese silicide named Brownleeite, was discovered within an interplanetary dust particle, or IDP, that appears to have originated from comet 26P/Grigg-Skjellerup. The comet originally was discovered in 1902 and reappears every 5 years. The team that made the discovery is headed by Keiko Nakamura-Messenger, a space scientist at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston... The Earth accretes about 40,000 tons of dust particles from space each year, originating mostly from disintegrating comets and asteroid collisions. This dust is a subject of intense interest because it is made of the original building blocks of the solar system, planets,...