NASA jubilant over probe’s success
WASHINGTON – Exultant scientists on Thursday said NASA’s seven-year voyage to collect dust from a comet and bring it home had ended in complete success, with perhaps 1 million of the primordial particles gently entrapped in collection trays filled with gossamer spun glass.
“We thought maybe the collectors wouldn’t open properly, or maybe they would be covered with gunk from the spacecraft,” said NASA’s Michael Zolensky, curator of the samples now ensconced at Houston’s Johnson Space Center. “But we opened the tray, and everything went exactly right. It’s fabulous.”
The Stardust space capsule’s 2.9 billion-mile round trip to comet Wild 2 ended with a flawless parachute landing in the Utah desert early Sunday. The sample canister was removed and flown to Houston, where it was opened Tuesday in a special clean room laboratory.
The samples are being kept in the same facility that houses the moon rocks collected by the Apollo-era astronauts. The particles will be extracted from the canister, prepared for shipment and sent to scientists around the world to begin a research project expected to last decades.
Comets are time capsules documenting the entire history of the solar system – visitors from the Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune whose composition has remained essentially unchanged for 4.5 billion years.
Stardust is the first mission to bring such material back to Earth, but it also provides an opening data point for NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, which was launched Thursday on the first mission to Pluto, another denizen of the icy Kuiper Belt. “We’re sampling the material that Pluto is made of,” said Stardust lead scientist Don Brownlee, of the University of Washington, in Seattle.
Brownlee, in a television news conference broadcast from Houston Thursday, said the Stardust collection trays probably captured up to 1 million cometary particles at least 0.00004 inches wide, and perhaps a dozen larger in diameter than a human hair. Handling, analyzing and even slicing such small particles presents little difficulty in modern research facilities.
Stardust was launched from Cape Canaveral on Feb. 7, 1999, and reached Wild 2 on Jan. 2, 2004. The spacecraft carried a tennis-racket-shaped particle collector like an ice cube tray with 132 small compartments.