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NASA'S STARDUST CRAFT RE-ENTRY AND LANDING
NASA's Stardust craft to return Jan 15 with cometary dust particles
The craft will enter earth's atmosphere on Jan 15, 2005 and land in Utah.
BY TOMS MATHEW
27 December, 2005
After a 4.6 billion km journey which lasted almost 7 long years, NASA's Stardust craft is expected to make a return on January 15, 2006. The Stardust craft has collected cometary and interstellar dust particles and scientists at NASA are anxiously waiting to have a thorough study at those particles which contain valuable information about particles from outer space.
Not much dust-collecting missions have been conducted, the last one being 1972 Apollo mission and last year's failed mission of Genesis. 1972 Apollo mission was meant to collect rocks from Moon and Genesis mission was for collecting space particles.
Scientists at NASA firmly believe that the return of Stardust with cometary particles will provide them with answers to some fundamental questions about comets and the origin of the solar system.
The return of the Stardust capsule will mark a record in terms of the velocity with which any human-made object has entered Earth's atmosphere. The expected velocity of the sample return craft is 46,176 km/h, which will cover the record set in May 1969 during the return of the Apollo 10 command module. The Stardust return capsule will land at the United States Air Force Utah Test and Training Range, Southwest of Salt Lake city.
NASA scientists have to perform several events before the craft makes its entry to the Earth's atmosphere. Targetting maneouvres have to be performed on January 5th and 1 th. Then after 2 days, Stardust will release its return capsule which will make an entry to the Earth's atmosphere above the Pacific Ocean. The return capsule will then be slowed down by parachutes before the craft makes its landing in Utah at about 10.15 pm. The collected material will then be transported to a special laboratory at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston for analysis.
Don Brownlee, Stardust principal investigator at the University of Washington in Seattle, said, "Locked within the cometary particles is unique chemical and physical information that could be the record of the formation of the planets and the materials from which they were made."
Scientists are taking no chances for the return of Stardust, which was launched in 1999, since they had to meet with the failed mission of Genesis last year. Genesis was on a mission to collect space particles and it crashed into the Utah desert due to some technical problems. So extra precautions are being taken and extra care is being given to make the landing safe and smooth.
According to Mary Cleave, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, comets are some of the most informative occupants of the solar system. "The more we can learn from science exploration missions like Stardust, the more we can prepare for human exploration to the moon, Mars and beyond," she says.
The collected particles may not be more than a third of a millimeter across. But that is more than enough for the NASA scientists who will further cut down the particles to smaller particles for their extensive study.
BY TOMS MATHEW
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