I know I haven't become irreversibily cynical and jaded because stories like this still get me excited.
A space capsule bearing comet and star dust successfully made a predawn landing in the Utah desert Sunday, completing a seven-year journey of almost 3 billion miles that could provide clues to the formation of the solar system.
The 100-pound sample container from the Stardust spacecraft landed at the U.S. Air Force Utah Test and Training range, southwest of Salt Lake City, at 5:10 a.m. EST following deployment of its two parachutes.
There was not initial indication that a small stabilizing drogue chute had deployed following the craft’s flaming reentry into the atmosphere, causing a few tense moments among the scientists and engineers awaiting Stardust’s return in the landing area and at mission control at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
However the main parachute opened on time at an altitude of 10,000 feet and could be seen by long-range infrared cameras and some ground observers, resulting in applause and cheers among flight controllers.
“All stations, main chute is open, we’re coming down slowly,” Thomas Duxbury, mission project manager said. Minutes later, he made the announcement that drew another round of applause and back-slapping: “All stations, we have touchdown.”
The landing was particularly tense because of memories of an earlier NASA probe called Genesis, which crashed in the same area in 2004 when its parachutes failed to open. Both craft shared similar design and landing systems. Genesis’ collector plates, which trapped solar particles during the craft’s two-year mission, were shattered and contaminated, but scientists maintain they can salvage some of the science.
After the Stardust craft touched down on the salt flats of the high plains desert, a recovery helicopter flew to its location but could not immediately find the capsule in the predawn darkness. However the sample vessel was located shortly before 6:00 a.m. and recovery teams on two other helicopters swooped in to help secure it.
About 50 minutes later, after technicians lifted the capsule into a transport cradle and enclosed it in two bags, the lead helicopter flew it to nearby Michael Army Air Field where a temporary, special “clean room” is set up in a hanger to reduce the chance of contamination. There, suited technicians are to prepare it for transport to a special laboratory at the Johnson Space Center in Houston later this week.
This final stage of the $212 million Stardust mission began four hours earlier when the main spacecraft released the sample capsule thousands of miles from Earth, severing cables and using a spring device to push it free. Later, the mother craft fired rockets that pulled it away and placed it into a new orbit around the sun.
The canister entered the Earth's atmosphere at a speed of 28,800 miles per hour, the fastest speed any human-made object has achieved entering the atmosphere, causing it to reach peak temperatures around 4,900 degrees Fahrenheit.
After its launching in 1999, Stardust circled the sun three times and even flew by the Earth in 2001 for a gravity boost to rendezvous with comet Wild 2 near Jupiter. The spacecraft came within 149 miles of the comet on Jan. 2, 2004, deploying shields to protect itself from cometary dust while extending a collector filled with a material called aerogel. This low-density silicon material, called “glass smoke” because it is composed of 99.8 percent air, gently slowed and trapped particles without significantly altering or damaging them.
During its long cruise periods, Stardust also spent 195 days collecting the particles from stars that constantly flow through the solar system from far out in space.
Scientists believe about a million samples of comet and interstellar dust, most of them less than one-tenth the width of a human hair, are locked inside the capsule. Researchers around the world are awaiting the samples, hoping they will provide clues to the origin of the planets and other bodies in the solar system.
The grains are believed to be pristine remains of the birth of the solar system some 4.6 billion years ago. Studying comets not only provides clues to how the solar system was formed but also could help explain how certain materials and conditions combined to form life, researchers said.
“This has been a fantastic opportunity to collect the most primitive material in the solar system,” said Donald Brownlee of the University of Washington in Seattle, the principal investigator for the mission. “We fully expect some of the comet particles to be older than the Sun.”
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