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Stardust Collector Innovators:
David Brownlee, Thomas C. Duxbury, Joseph Vellinga, Kenneth Williams

It was a big, bold mission: Fly halfway to Jupiter to meet up with a 3-mile-wide comet, hurtle through its trailing cloud of dust and gas at 13,000 mph, and capture particle samples using a tennis racket-shaped screen of aerogel. Oh yeah, and then return to Earth without destroying the samples, which date back nearly 4.6 billion years to the dawn of the solar system. It all came to fruition on Jan. 15 of this year, when the Stardust return capsule slammed into the Utah salt flats-samples intact. In addition to bringing home the first comet and interstellar dust samples, Stardust made the record books as history's farthest out-and-back sample-return mission (2.9 billion miles in all) and for the fastest atmospheric re-entry (29,000 mph). "We came up with this great spacecraft design, where we could launch from Earth and with very little energy loop three times around the sun and slingshot out to the comet," says University of Washington astronomy professor Donald Brownlee, who is now analyzing the samples with about 200 other scientists. "We grabbed a piece of our early solar system," he says. "It's like a dream."

Article from Popular Mechanics.

Photo credits: NASA/JPL

To learn more about Stardust from NASA's Web site, please click here.