Capsule hurtles to Earth with first comet samples
DUGWAY PROVING GROUND, Utah – A space capsule carrying comet dust is headed for a landing on Earth in a mission scientists hope will ultimately yield clues to the origins of the solar system.
NASA’s Stardust spacecraft, hovering 69,000 miles up, released the shuttlecock-shaped capsule late Saturday, putting it on course for a blazing re-entry early today.
Mission control engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory erupted in applause after the capsule separation.
If successful, the mission will mark the first time a spacecraft has flown into deep space and brought back tiny fragments of a comet. Most of the granules are so small that a microscope will be required to study them.
The capsule will spin in free fall until it enters the atmosphere and parachutes down in the Utah desert. Its searing return at about 29,000 mph will be the fastest re-entry of any man-made probe.
The Stardust mothership will remain in permanent orbit around the sun.
Comets are frozen bodies of ice and dust that formed soon after a gaseous disk collapsed to create the sun and planets 4.6 billion years ago. Comets formed from what was left over, and studying them could shed light on the solar system’s birth.
The cosmic samples were gathered from comet Wild 2 in 2004 during Stardust’s seven-year journey. The spacecraft used a tennis racket-sized collector mitt to snatch the dust and store it in an aluminum canister.
The mission cost $212 million.
Scientists believe about a million samples of comet and interstellar dust – most tinier than the width of a human hair – will be returned.
The dust grains, believed to be pristine leftovers from the birth of the solar system, contain many of the organic molecules necessary for life. Some of the particles are thought to be older than the sun.
After landing, a helicopter crew will recover the capsule and bring it to a clean room on the base for processing. Then it will be flown later this week to the Johnson Space Center in Houston for analysis.
Launched in 1999, the Stardust spacecraft traveled nearly 3 billion miles, looping around the sun three times.