NASA Stardust Returns to Earth

quadsoft writes "The Globe and Mail reports "Dugway Proving Ground, Utah -- A space capsule ferrying the first comet dust samples to Earth parachuted onto a remote stretch of desert before dawn Sunday, drawing cheers from elated scientists. The touchdown capped a seven-year journey by NASA's Stardust spacecraft, which zipped past a comet in 2004 to capture minute dust particles and store them in the capsule.""

Wow

This is a truly impressive mission. Fire and forget is one thing but bringing back pieces of a comet is... in my opinion, right up there with the moon missions.

Re:Wow

What's MOST impressive is that they got the accelerometers on right this time [wikipedia.org]!

Re:Wow

What's unimpressive is that the stardust mission is actually the first of the two missions and genisis is the second.
NASA 'trimming' of standards and budgets for lean cost savings doomed the launched in 2001 genesis mission and the older 1999 launched mor

In unrelated news...,

All contact has been lost with the residents of the town of Piedmont, AZ. State Police have set up a perimeter around the area and all residents are advised to stay indoors until further notice.

Not opened yet...

I don't see them dropping down [nasa.gov] with clotted blood yet.

Then again, they didn't open the capsule - and who knows what happens when they bring it to the doctor and he doesn't run a lunar lab...
(btw thanks for copying my comment [slashdot.org] ;=)

Re:In unrelated news...,

It's a Wildfire.

Anyway,

For my real comment, is this the stardust that NASA (or somebody else) wants to give to people people to analyze because they also grabbed some debris from a recent (and by recent I mean 10 million years ago) exploding star?

Re:Anyway,

Yes it is. Actually they are going to send out pictures of the capture area and have people search visually for the dust. There actually seems to be a long process to get trained for it.

Stardust Mission May Continue

According to the article Capsule of comet dust lands back on Earth [msn.com], "The Stardust mothership will remain in orbit around the sun, and Duxbury said NASA is considering sending it to another comet or asteroid."

So, even after this successful capsule recovery, this might not be the end.

Typo, I hope

From the article:

Early Sunday, that capsule nose-dived through Earth's atmosphere at a record 29,000 mph, the fastest return for a man-man probe.

No comment required...

Man-Man

the fastest return for a man-man probe
No comment required...

Not that there's anything wrong with that!

Stardust@home

Well, now that it's back, we help them and join in the search: http://stardustathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/ [berkeley.edu]

Some things are best left undefined...

From the Globe and Mail article:

Early Sunday, that capsule nose-dived through Earth's atmosphere at a record 29,000 mph, the fastest return for a man-man probe.

I am not sure I want to know what a man-man probe is...

d.

Re:Some things are best left undefined...

Presumably a Freudian slip. Pretty deep when you think of it.

Yay for science!

This is another example of why science is important and why it should be respected.

We did it this time. The previous mission [wikipedia.org] didn't work right, but this one nailed it. The political naysayers and critics who want to redefine science should pay attention.

We did it this time, but even with our previous failure, how could we attain such a level of precision with our measuring and then engineering of the laws of physics and chemistry to achieve such a specific goal, to send out a space probe that mindlessly orbits around the solar system for years and comes back to us like a cosmic boomerang, and yet be drastically and unanimously incorrect when it comes to measuring the rate of radioactive decay of various elements in the extensive global collection of terrestrial geological samples and also the synthetic elements we've created during the twentieth century atomic age?

Have all the scientists in all the nations of the world simply got it exactly, equally wrong?

The scientific framework of ideas is well-established and the theories are interdependent. This is why we can readily reject challenges like "Intelligent Design".

Because they just don't fit in.

Re:Yay for science!

The scientific framework of ideas is well-established and the theories are interdependent. This is why we can readily reject challenges like "Intelligent Design".

I'm not a proponent of ID, but if you want to argue against something it's best to understand it--and your argument has nothing to do with ID. While ID my be embraced by some literalist creationists as a way to slip in the side door, ID itself has no contradiction with things like the fossil record or carbon-dating results. At the core, evolution says "we evolved over time, through a combination of pure random chance and natural selection", whereas ID says "maybe it wasn't all random chance".

The more crackpot end is where people try to prove ID, when it clearly isn't provable scientifically. But keep in mind that we also can't prove that what is attributable to random chance is truly random, and isn't actually at least sometimes influenced by some outside force with motivations that we don't understand.

In short, it's perfectly possible to believe in a higher power guiding the development of life at some level without the slightest contraction with accepted scientififc observations. Lots of religious people do; you just don't hear about them because they aren't raising a big stink or proposing crackpot 'science' to try to make others accept that view.

Re:Hey Smarty....

Maybe they'll teach you what a "Run-On Sentence" is.

Take an English class yourself, and maybe they'll talk about poetry.

I like run-on sentences. I'm just trying to communicate. Don't like it? Bite me, foe :)

Re:Hey Smarty....

What he wanted to point out, is that this mission is one more great achievement of science and engineering, one more proof of how valid the methods and the logic behind science and engineering is - regardless of what religious teachers are trying to persua

Re:Hey Smarty....

Can you imagine Wilbur Wright saying "Well Orville, now that we know how to fly, I guess we can tell everyone to stop going to church"

Actually there were lots of religious based protests at the time stating that we shouldn't attempt to try and fly. "If

Went better than the last one, it seems.

http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/09/0 8/1625231/ [slashdot.org]

Seems NASA actually did something RIGHT for once. Three cheers for NASA!

Re:Went better than the last one, it seems.

Yeah you right spirit and opportunity , mars express , pathfinder , mars global surveyor , mars reconnaissance orbiter , vikings missions , mariners missions , apollos missions , hubble , deep impact ...etc was all failed mission . We are so dumb to put

Stardust@Home

Sit at your computer and help the search with Stardust@Home. [slashdot.org]

-

The chips are down!

Where do I collect the one with my name on it?

re: http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/overview/microchip/fa q.html [nasa.gov]

Some serious rocket science

WOW! Imagine pushing the return capsule off your side of the mother ship at 28,860 mi/hr and 4 hours later finding it safely on the ground...in the exact spot you wanted it to land. Mr. Bush, this is how space exploration should be done!

From NASA press release [nasa.gov]:
"I have been waiting for this day since the early 1980s when Deputy Principal Investigator Dr. Peter Tsou of JPL and I designed a mission to collect comet dust," said Dr. Don Brownlee, Stardust principal investigator from the University of Washington, Seattle. "To see the capsule safely back on its home planet is a thrilling accomplishment."

NASA has posted a few pictures and press releases. [nasa.gov]

Congratulations to all involved.

The view in Calif*

For a good time, go to geocities.com/heroineworshipper/sharpened.jpg. The faint line in the sky is the spaceship re-entering as seen from Antioch, Calif*.