[meteorite-list] NASA's Stardust Passes Moon, Just Hours Away From Earth Return

[Ron Baalke]

MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE
JET PROPULSION LABORATORY
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
PASADENA, CALIF. 91109 TELEPHONE (818) 354-5011
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov

D.C. Agle  (818) 354-5011
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

Dwayne Brown/Merrilee Fellows  (202) 358-1726/(818) 393-0754
NASA Headquarters, Washington 						

NEWS RELEASE 2006-008 				January 14, 2006 

NASA'S STARDUST PASSES MOON, JUST HOURS AWAY FROM EARTH RETURN 

Less than one day of space travel separates Earth and history's first 
comet sample return mission. Today at 9:30 a.m. Pacific time 
(10:30 a.m. Mountain time), the Stardust spacecraft will cross the moon's 
orbit as the craft makes its way toward Earth. 

The final 400,000 kilometers (249,000 miles) of the mission to return a 
capsule containing cometary particles to Earth will take just 16 hours 
and 27 minutes. It took the Apollo astronauts about three days to make the 
same journey.

"Our entire flight and recovery team will be watching this final leg of our 
flight with tremendous expectation as we implement a precise celestial ballet 
in delivering our capsule to Earth," said Stardust Project Manager Tom Duxbury 
of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "We feel like parents 
awaiting the return of a child who left us young and innocent, who now 
returns holding answers to the most profound questions of our solar system."

Prior to passing the moon's orbit, the spacecraft performed a final maneuver 
to place it on a precise path to reach its landing target on the Utah Test 
and Training Range. The burn, which took place yesterday at 8:53 p.m. Pacific 
time (9:53 p.m. Mountain time), took 58.5 seconds to complete and changed the 
spacecraft's velocity by 2.9 mph. At the time of the burn the spacecraft was 
about 706,000 kilometers (439,000 miles) from Earth. 

NASA's Stardust mission has traveled about 4.5 billion kilometers (2.88 
billion miles) during its seven year round-trip odyssey. It is a journey that 
carried it around the sun three times and beyond Mars and the asteroid belt -- 
as far out as half-way to Jupiter. This cosmic voyage was in quest of cometary 
and interstellar dust particles, which scientists believe will help provide 
answers to fundamental questions about comets and the origins of the solar 
system.

"With the information we gathered during our encounter with comet Wild 2 in 
Jan. 2004, Stardust has already provided us with some remarkable science," 
said Dr. Don Brownlee, Stardust principal investigator at the University of 
Washington, Seattle. "With the return of cometary samples, we'll be able to 
work with the actual building materials of the solar system as they were when 
the solar system was formed. It will be a great day for science."

The last few hours of the Stardust mission will be filled with significant 
milestones. Today at about 8:15 p.m. Pacific time (9:15 p.m. Mountain time), 
mission controllers will command the spacecraft to begin the 
computer-controlled sequence that will release the sample return capsule. 

At 9:56 p.m. Pacific time (10:56 p.m. Mountain time), the Stardust spacecraft 
will complete the sequence by severing the umbilical cables between spacecraft 
and capsule. One minute later, springs aboard the spacecraft will literally 
push the capsule away, putting it into its trajectory toward the Utah Test 
and Training Range.  Fifteen minutes later, the "mother ship," the Stardust 
spacecraft, will perform a maneuver to enter orbit around the sun.

At 1:57 a.m. Pacific time (2:57 a.m. Mountain time), four hours after being 
released by the Stardust spacecraft, the capsule will enter Earth's atmosphere 
at an altitude of 125 kilometers (410,000 feet) over Northern California. At 
this point it will be 20 kilometers (12.43 miles) east of the Pacific coast and 
22 kilometers (13.67 miles) south of the Oregon-California border. The velocity 
of the sample return capsule as it enters Earth's atmosphere at 46,440 
kilometers per hour (28,860 miles per hour) will be the greatest of any 
human-made object on record. This will surpass the record set in May 1969 
during the return of the Apollo 10 command module. 

The Stardust sample return capsule will release a drogue parachute at an 
altitude of approximately 32 kilometers (105,000 feet). Once the capsule has 
descended to an altitude of about 3 kilometers (10,000 feet) at 2:05 a.m. 
Pacific time (3:05 a.m. Mountain time), the main parachute will deploy. 
The capsule is scheduled to land on the salt flats of the Utah Test and 
Training Range at 2:12 a.m. Pacific time (3:12 a.m. Mountain time).

If weather conditions allow, the recovery team will be flown by helicopter 
to recover the capsule and fly it to the U.S. Army Dugway Proving Ground, Utah, 
for initial processing. If weather does not allow helicopters to fly, special 
off-road vehicles will be used to transport the recovery team to retrieve the 
capsule and return it to Dugway. The collector grid with cometary and 
interstellar samples will be moved to a special laboratory at NASA's Johnson 
Space Center, Houston, where they will be preserved and studied by scientists.

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the Stardust mission 
for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Lockheed Martin Space 
Systems, Denver, developed and operates the spacecraft. 

For information about the Stardust mission on the Web, 

visit http://www.nasa.gov/stardust .  

For information about NASA and agency programs on the Web, visit 

http://www.nasa.gov/home . 

                                    - end -