Spacecraft poised to gather stardust

The aerogel dust collector

February 21, 2000
Web posted at: 4:39 PM EST (2139 GMT)

By Richard Stenger
CNN Interactive Staff Writer

PASADENA, California (CNN) -- A spacecraft on the first mission to collect material from beyond the moon and return it to Earth should begin collecting interstellar dust on Tuesday, according to project managers.

Known as Stardust, the refrigerator-sized ship is one year into a seven-year journey and already outside the orbit of Mars. Scientists hope the small craft helps solve big mysteries related to the origins of the universe.

Stardust is also the first unmanned NASA craft dispatched on an extraterrestrial pickup and delivery mission. The last time the agency collected and returned samples from outer space was in 1972 with Apollo 17, the final manned lunar landing.

Engineers with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, sent radio commands on Monday directing Stardust to warm up its motors to a normal operating temperature.

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"Come tomorrow, they'll be toasty warm and be ready to open the capsule and deploy the collector," said Thomas Druxbury, a JPL scientist and chief pilot for Stardust.

The collector resembles a large waffle iron and is covered with a transparent, ultralight glass foam called aerogel. Similar substances were used on the space shuttle and Mir to collect space materials.

Mission engineers on Tuesday will send additional radio signals directing the spacecraft to deploy the collector, Druxbury said. The commands, traveling at the speed of light, take almost 30 minutes to reach Stardust.

The craft is flying near the main asteroid belt in an area with a current of dust that originated outside the solar system, Druxbury said. Stardust is expected to retrieve fewer than 100 of the swift interstellar particles, he said.

One side of the collector will catch interstellar dust for the next two months and again for two months in 2002.

The other side of the collector is designed to gather tiny particles from Comet Wild-2 when Stardust passes within 90 miles (170 kilometers) of the ancient ice ball in 2004.

Possibly the oldest bodies in the solar system, comets could contain a record of the original material that formed the sun and planets 4.5 billion years ago.

By studying what Stardust returns, scientists think they could learn if comets provided the water and organic material necessary to form life.

In January 2006, Stardust is scheduled to swing by Earth and release its sample capsule, which will parachute into a military base near Salt Lake City, Utah.

Even less than a thimble full of dust from the 2.5-mile (4-km) wide comet would be enough for the kind of detailed analysis that scientists plan, according to mission researchers.

Stardust was launched aboard a Boeing Delta rocket on February 7, 1999. The $200 million mission is first from the United States devoted solely to a comet. NASA plans several more in the first half of this decade.