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Aptly named 'Stardust' will bring some home

If everything goes right, the craft will touch down in Utah with little bits of comet tail from millions of miles away.

By CURTIS KRUEGER
Published January 2, 2006

Somewhere over the Utah desert this month, a spacecraft roughly the size of a washing machine will plunge to Earth.

For the Stardust craft, the Jan. 15 landing will cap a remarkable mission. Since blasting off from Florida in 1999, Stardust has traveled nearly 3-billion miles and circled the sun three times, going farther than any other spaceship that has returned to our planet.

Stardust has scooped dust out of a comet's tail, and its mission marks the first time NASA has brought back material from a place in space farther away than the moon.

That's if there's a successful landing.

In 2004, another NASA spacecraft carrying precious scientific cargo crashed into the ground. Scientists counted themselves lucky that many of the samples appeared to have survived. Lockheed Martin Space Systems built that spacecraft, called Genesis, as well as Stardust.

NASA officials say they're confident parachutes will unfurl properly from the 101-pound, 3-foot wide Stardust capsule. But with such a complex mission, "bringing it home for the first time is the only way to test a system like this," acknowledges Ed Hirst, mission systems manager for Stardust at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Astronomers are fascinated by comets, because comets are older than the solar system itself. Comets are hunks of dust, ice and gas. They are considered the stuff planets were formed from billions of years ago.

Last year, in the Deep Impact mission, a spacecraft crashed into a comet - on purpose - while spaceborne cameras and telescopes looked on, relaying data about the comet's structure.

Unlike Deep Impact, the Stardust mission was designed to carry something home: thousands of grains of comet-dust for scientists to study.

"People all over world will be able to analyze them down to a single atomic scale," says Don Brownlee, a University of Washington astronomy professor and principal investigator for Stardust.

Comets are "the best preserved samples of the initial material that actually made the sun and Earth and planets and even ourselves," Brownlee said. "So this is a history project."

Stardust launched Feb. 7, 1999, from Cape Canaveral and went into orbit around the sun. In 2000 it used a special collection device to gather interstellar particles flowing through the solar system. In 2002, on its second orbit around the sun, it flew near an asteroid named Annefrank. The journey took Stardust farther into space than Mars.

Then came the fun part. At the end of 2003, the spaceship approached a comet named Wild 2, and deployed a tennis-racket-like device covered with a sort of cosmic fly-paper called aerogel. The aerogel is a soft, spongy, silicon-based substance that was designed to catch the bits of comet dust, traveling at thousands of miles an hour, without damaging them.

Stardust's capsule will separate from its main spacecraft late in the night of Jan. 14 and fall to Earth at more than 28,000 mph. Early the next morning, it is scheduled to parachute onto the Utah Test & Training Range.

For more information: http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov

Staff writer Curtis Krueger can be reached at krueger@sptimes.com or 727 893-8232.

[Last modified January 2, 2006, 17:19:25]