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Stardust, a spacecraft designed to gather samples of dust spewed from a comet and return the dust to Earth for detailed analysis, has been selected to become the fourth flight mission in NASA's Discovery program. The spacecraft, to be launched in February 1999, will also gather and return samples of interstellar dust encountered during its trip through the solar system to fly by Comet Wild-2 in January 2004. Comet Wild-2 is a "fresh comet" because its orbit was deflected from much farther out in the solar system by the gravitational attraction of Jupiter in 1974. Stardust will approach as close as 100 kilometers (62 miles) to the comet's nucleus, capturing cometary samples with an unusual material called aerogel. A return capsule carrying the captured dust samples would parachute to Earth in a landing on a dry Utah lake bed in January 2006. Stardust will also carry an optical camera that should return cometary images with 10 times the clarity of those taken of Halley's Comet by previous space missions. A mass spectrometer provided by Germany also will perform compositional analysis of the samples while in-flight. The Stardust mission team will be led by Principal Investigator Dr. Donald Brownlee of the University of Washington in Seattle, with Lockheed-Martin Astronautics, Denver, as the contractor building the spacecraft. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA, will manage the project for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C. #####
Description
Stardust, a spacecraft designed to gather samples of dust spewed from a comet and return the dust to Earth for detailed analysis, has been selected to become the fourth flight mission in NASA's Discovery program. The spacecraft, to be launched in February 1999, will also gather and return samples of interstellar dust encountered during its trip through the solar system to fly by Comet Wild-2 in January 2004. Comet Wild-2 is a "fresh comet" because its orbit was deflected from much farther out in the solar system by the gravitational attraction of Jupiter in 1974. Stardust will approach as close as 100 kilometers (62 miles) to the comet's nucleus, capturing cometary samples with an unusual material called aerogel. A return capsule carrying the captured dust samples would parachute to Earth in a landing on a dry Utah lake bed in January 2006. Stardust will also carry an optical camera that should return cometary images with 10 times the clarity of those taken of Halley's Comet by previous space missions. A mass spectrometer provided by Germany also will perform compositional analysis of the samples while in-flight. The Stardust mission team will be led by Principal Investigator Dr. Donald Brownlee of the University of Washington in Seattle, with Lockheed-Martin Astronautics, Denver, as the contractor building the spacecraft. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA, will manage the project for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C. #####
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