[meteorite-list] NASA's Stardust Sample Return was 10 Years Ago Today

[Ron Baalke]

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=4821

NASA's Stardust Sample Return was 10 Years Ago Today
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
January 15, 2016

It was less than an hour into the new day of January 15, 2006 (EST), when 
tens of thousands of miles above our planet, two cable cutters and two 
retention bolts fired, releasing a spring which pushed a 101-pound (46-kilogram) 
sample return capsule away from its mother ship. Later, during its final 
plunge Earthward, the capsule would become the fastest human-made object 
to enter our atmosphere, achieving a velocity of about 28,600 mph (12.8 
kilometers per second).

Then, at 5:10 a.m. EST (3:10 a.m. MST), for the first time in seven years, 
the sample return capsule finally stopped moving. By the time it landed, 
under parachute in the desert salt flats of the U.S. Air Force's Utah 
Test and Training Range in Dugway, the capsule had travelled 2.88 billion 
miles (4.5 billion kilometers) -- a journey that carried it around the 
sun three times and as far out as halfway to Jupiter. Inside the Stardust 
mission's graphite-epoxy covered capsule was the objective of its prime 
mission -- humanity's first samples collected from a celestial body in 
deep space (beyond the Earth-moon system).

"The Stardust sample return capsule carried inside cometary material it 
gathered from comet Wild-2 during a flyby in January of 2004," said Don 
Brownlee, Stardust principal investigator from the University of Washington, 
Seattle. "The spacecraft deployed a tennis racket-like, aerogel-lined 
collector, and we flew the spacecraft within 150 miles (241 kilometers), 
capturing particles from the coma as we went."

Two days after the return, the sample return capsule's science canister 
and its cargo of comet and interstellar dust particles was stowed inside 
a special aluminum carrying case and transported to a curatorial facility 
at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. Eileen Stansbery -- now Chief 
Scientist at Johnson -- worked on Stardust as the deputy director of Astromaterials 
Research and Exploration Science at the time. "We were investigating big 
questions with the smallest samples -- how did our solar system form? 
What are we made of? This comet is representative of one of the most primitive 
bodies in the solar system, preserving the earliest record of material 
from the nebula during the 'planetesimal' forming stage in its evolution."

Brownlee notes, "The science team couldn't wait to get their hands on 
the samples. It had been 10 years of planning and then seven more years 
for the actual mission, so everyone was raring to go."

The Stardust mission's international team of scientists -- 200 strong 
-- helped re-write the book on comets and the evolution of the solar system. 
The Stardust mission samples indicated that some comets may have included 
materials ejected from the early sun and may have formed very differently 
than scientists had theorized.

"What we found was remarkable," said Brownlee. "Instead of rocky materials 
that formed around previous generations of stars, we found that most of 
the comet's rocky matter formed inside our solar system at extremely high 
temperature. In great contrast to its ice, our comet's rocky material 
had formed under white-hot conditions."

Comet ice formed in cold regions beyond the planet Neptune, but the rocks, 
probably the bulk of any comet's mass, formed much closer to the sun in 
regions hot enough to evaporate bricks. The materials that Stardust collected 
from comet Wild-2 contain pre-solar "stardust" grains, identified on the 
basis of their unusual isotopic composition, but these grains are very 
rare.

"Even though we confirmed comets are ancient bodies with an abundance 
of ice -- some which formed a few tens of degrees above absolute zero 
at the edge of the solar system -- we now know that comets are really 
a mix of materials made by conditions of both 'fire and ice,'" said Brownlee.

While Stardust was the first deep-space sample-return mission, it was 
by no means the last. The Japanese Space Agency (JAXA's) Hayabusa mission 
collected samples from an asteroid and returned them to Earth in 2010, 
and the Hayabusa 2 mission to return material from asteroid Ryugu is currently 
underway. Still to come is NASA's OSIRIS-Rex mission. Scheduled to launch 
in September of this year, OSIRIS-REx will travel to the near-Earth asteroid 
Bennu and retrieve at least 2.1 ounces (60 grams) of surface material 
and return it to Earth for study.

"The ways to explore space are probably as big as space itself," said 
Brownlee. "But for my money, you can't beat sample return. Having samples 
there in front of you, available for laboratory analysis when you want 
-- that's tough to beat."

Another thing about Stardust that was tough to beat was the spacecraft 
itself. Launched on Feb. 7, 1999, Stardust flew past an asteroid known 
as Annefrank, flew past and collected particle samples from comet Wild-2, 
and returned those particles to Earth in a sample return capsule in January 
2006. As planned, the Stardust spacecraft did not re-enter Earth's atmosphere 
along with its sample return capsule. Instead, it went into a solar orbit. 
NASA then re-tasked the still-healthy spacecraft to perform a flyby of 
comet Tempel 1 on Feb. 14, 2011.

For more information on the prime mission of the Stardust spacecraft, 
please visit:

http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov

For more information on the Stardust-NExT mission, please visit:

http://stardustnext.jpl.nasa.gov

For more information on the OSIRIS-REx mission, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/osiris-rex/index.html


Media Contact

DC Agle
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California
818-393-9011
agle at jpl.nasa.gov 

2016-012