Less than one day of
space travel separates Earth and history's first comet sample
return mission. Today, 01.14.06, 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 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 439,000 miles from Earth.
NASA's Stardust mission
has traveled about 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 (pictured below) 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 410,000 feet over
Northern California. At this point it will be 12.43 miles east of
the Pacific coast and 13.67 miles south of the Oregon-California
border. The velocity of the sample return capsule as it enters
Earth's atmosphere at 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 105,000 feet. Once the
capsule has descended to an altitude of about 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).
Capsule Milestones (all times approximate EST on Jan. 15)
- 1257: Spacecraft releases capsule
- 0457: Capsule enters Earth atmosphere
- 0505: Main parachute deploys
- 0512.: Capsule lands
- 0522 (approx.): Helicopter and crew land near
capsule
- 0720 (approx.): Capsule arrives at temporary
cleanroom
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.