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(CNN) -- The year: 2006. A fireball plunges through the night sky over Utah. It lands in the middle of snow-covered salt flats, melting a crater in the snow. Inside the crater, a saucer-shaped, metallic object smolders. An attached light pulses. The capsule contains material not of this Earth --- stuff that has reached our planet from beyond the edges of the solar system. This B-movie scenario will become reality if all goes according to plan in NASA's Stardust mission, scheduled to launch February 6 on an epic, seven-year journey. The Stardust project will send a spacecraft flying through the cloud of dust that surrounds the nucleus of a comet -- and, for the first time ever, bring cometary material back to Earth. Three other unmanned missions to comets will follow, including one that will attempt a landing. Why the big push to investigate these celestial snowballs? Well, for one thing, scientists believe they come the closest to preserving the ices and organic material that were present at the early history the universe.
From dust to dust"The scientific goal is to find the building blocks of planets and study them down to a phenomenal resolution -- to the level of an atom," says Joseph Vellinga, program manager for Stardust partner Lockheed Martin Astronautics. "Scientists have long sought a sample directly from a known comet because of the unique chemical and physical information these bodies contain about the earliest history of the solar system," said Dr. Edward Weiler, NASA's associate administrator for space science. The spacecraft also will collect dust from a recently discovered flow of particles that passes through our solar system from interstellar space. As in the proverbial "from dust to dust," this interstellar dust is the stuff from which all solid objects in the universe are made, and the state to which everything eventually returns. While the Stardust spacecraft's main job is to pick up and deliver a sample to scientists back on Earth, it will also radio some on-the-spot analytical observations of the comet and interstellar dust. "The samples we will collect are extremely small, less than a micron, or 1/25,000th of an inch, in size, and can only be adequately studied in laboratories with sophisticated analytical instruments," said Dr. Donald C. Brownlee of the University of Washington, principal investigator for the mission.
Close encounter of the dirt kindStardust will meet up with Comet Wild-2 on January 2, 2004. Dressed for survival behind armored shields, the robotic spacecraft will document its 10-hour passage through the hailstorm of comet debris with scientific instruments and a navigation camera.
On approach to the dust cloud, or "coma," the spacecraft will flip open a tennis-racket-shaped particle catcher filled with a smoke-colored glass foam called aerogel to capture the comet particles. Aerogel, the lowest-density material in the world, has enough "give" in it to slow and stop particles without altering them too much, according to NASA. After the sample has been collected, the aerogel capturing device will fold down into a return capsule, which closes like a clamshell to contain the sample for its safe delivery to Earth. On January 15, 2006, a parachute will set the capsule gently onto the salt flats of the Utah desert for retrieval. Stardust was competitively selected in the fall of 1995 under NASA's Discovery Program of low-cost, highly focused science missions. As a Discovery mission, Stardust is cost-capped at less than $200 million, and is the product of a partnership involving NASA, academia and industry. CNN Programs Sunday 1:30pm - 2:00pm ET (10:30am - 11:00am PT) Saturday 1:30pm - 2:00pm ET (10:30am - 11:00am PT) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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