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Blobrana


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The Stardust probe
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Four years ago, NASA's Stardust spacecraft chased down a comet and collected grains of dust blowing off its nucleus. When the spacecraft Comet Wild-2 returned, comet dust was shipped to scientists all over the world, including University of Minnesota physics professor Bob Pepin. After testing helium and neon trapped in the dust specks, Pepin and his colleagues report that while the comet formed in the icy fringes of the solar system, the dust appears to have been born close to the infant sun and bombarded by intense radiation from these and other gases before being flung out beyond Neptune and trapped in the comet. The research appears in the Jan. 4 issue of the journal Science.
The finding opens the question of what was going on in the early life of the solar system to subject the dust to such intense radiation and hurl them hundreds of millions of miles from their birthplace.
The studies of cometary dust are part of a larger effort to trace the history of our celestial neighbourhood.

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Blobrana


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Stardust NExT mission
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 It began with two comets (Wild 2 and Tempel 1), two spacecraft (Stardust and Deep Impact) and two encounters. But before the four objects orbit their separate ways, their dance may get more intricate -- with two recombining to form a new couple; one pushing forward toward an unfamiliar match, and one left to finish solo.
Led by Cornell astronomy professor Joe Veverka, a team of astronomers and engineers made a final pitch on May 15 to lead the proposed Stardust New Exploration of Tempel 1 (Stardust NExT) mission. Their presentation came at an all-day site review at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) in Pasadena.
If the mission gets the go-ahead, Stardust NExT will use the still-healthy Stardust spacecraft -- which dropped off a capsule of dust from the comet Wild 2 in the Utah desert last year -- to observe the comet Tempel 1 two years after a probe released by the Deep Impact spacecraft carved a crater into that comet's surface.

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Blobrana


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The Stardust probe
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Stardust's capsule of comet dust parachuted down to the Utah desert in January 2006. NASA scientists found an unusual titanium nitride mineral inside a single particle of dust collected by the probe. This mineral, called osbornite, forms only at high temperatures, and researchers put it down to material that came from the inner solar system.
Stardust was propelled by hydrazine.
So could the hydrazine have reacted with titanium compounds from the spacecraft or the comet to form osbornite?

"No chance. The titanium nitride grains are sitting inside of other minerals, which are sitting inside other minerals" - Michael Zolensky, Stardust researcher at NASA's Johnson Space Centre in Houston, Texas.

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Blobrana


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Donald Brownlee found a message in a 4.5-billion-year-old bottle, and it's an intriguing read.
The bottle is a comet known as Wild 2, formed during our solar system's infancy.
The message is contained in a collection of particles gathered by the Stardust spacecraft.

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Blobrana


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Osbornite
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Spanish scientists say one of the major discoveries from last year's "Stardust" space mission might have resulted from rocket booster contamination. Stardust was the first U.S. space mission to capture samples from a comet and return the material to Earth. But scientists were surprised to find Stardust had collected tiny grains of the mineral osbornite, which chemically is titanium nitride.
Astronomers concluded the osbornite could have formed near the sun, and ejected to the outer reaches of the solar system -- an indication that the infant solar system was a much more violent and place then previous believed.
But Jesus Martinez-Frias and colleagues at the Centre for Astrobiology in Madrid suggest another possible explanation.
The researchers note the Stardust's rocket thrusters used a propellant of ultra-pure hydrazine, which is also used to make titanium nitride on Earth, and might have reacted in space with titanium from the comet or spacecraft to form titanium nitride.
Martinez-Frias and colleagues say further studies are needed before reaching a final conclusion on the osbornite origin.
The theory is detailed in the May 16 issue of the journal Energy & Fuels.

Source  UPI


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Blobrana


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The Stardust probe
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Stardust's Data May Be Contaminated
The origin of the universe has been the subject of scienceand science fictionfor centuries. NASAs Stardust Mission, launched in 1994, aimed to put an end to the pondering once and for all by collecting samples from Comet Wild-2, which scientists believed might still contain materials from the universes conception (and which recently brought more details about the diversity of comets themselves). When the mission finally returned to Earth last year (and we tracked its landing from the air), the samples revealed the presence of osbornite, which indicates that the big beginning was hotter and more violent than scientists had previously imagined.

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Blobrana


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NASA's Scott Sanford was one of the first scientists to reach the small Stardust mission capsule sitting on the west desert floor a little more than a year ago.
Now he and other scientists around the globe are gleaning information about the origins of the solar system from the microscopic comet bits recovered from the capsule.
Under the chilly pre-dawn skies of Jan. 15, 2006, Sanford and other researchers watched the intact capsule land and realized their seven-year wait for pieces of a comet was finally over. The space agency's Stardust spacecraft dropped off a sample return canister, which landed around 3 a.m., containing debris snagged from a comet.

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Blobrana


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It has been nearly a year since Stardust successfully released the capsule that returned the Wild 2 dust particles to earth and sent its last signal before being placed in a hibernation state. That situation changed when the Spacecraft Team (SCT) recently radiated commands to have STARDUST resume communications in order to determine the spacecraft's health for a follow-on mission to the comet Tempel 1. As usual, the reliable spacecraft responded to our commands and the signal was received at the expected time. There was concern that a large solar flare last December could have placed the spacecraft in an unknown state. The first telemetry indicated a processor reboot had occurred but the spacecraft's subsystems were in excellent condition. After restoring communication, the remainder of the Deep Space Network (DSN) pass was used to obtain the history data for the last year.

After saying "bon voyage" on January 29, 2006, the spacecraft passed through its perihelion (0.92 AU), the closest approach to the sun for the spacecraft, and made it safely through. On July 10, 2006, a spontaneous reboot of the processor occurred. The cause of the reboot is unknown but was probably due to solar/space interference. The spacecraft returned itself to its safe mode state and continued
The spacecraft returned itself to its safe mode state and continued cruising. On December 7, 2006, another large solar flare created problems for the Star Camera. After struggling for several hours to obtain good star images, an attitude control error caused the spacecraft to re-enter safe mode. Once again the spacecraft returned to its nominal safe mode state where it remained until contacted last Monday.

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Blobrana


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The fleets of probes we humans have sent out in recent decades to explore the solar system are nothing short of dazzling, but there's nothing like bringing back to Earth actual extraterrestrial material to study.
So when a capsule filled with particles snatched from the comet Wild 2 by NASA's Stardust spacecraft landed last January with a soft thud in the Utah desert, the scientific community immediately pounced on it.
Less than a year later, dozens of scientists have pooled their results to make a grand presentation in Science. They found a collection of wildly heterogeneous dust grains and captured gases. Trapped in the spacecraft's light, porous aerogel collectors were some 1,000 particles between 5 and 300 µm across. Among the particles are inorganics such as the silicate minerals olivine and pyroxene and a host of organics, some contained in the dust and others in the form of gas

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Blobrana


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Just as kits of little plastic bricks can be used to make everything from models of the space shuttle to the statue of liberty, comets are looking more and more like one of nature's toolkits for creating life. These chunks of ice and dust wandering our solar system appear to be filled with organic molecules that are the building blocks of life.
The discovery of two kinds of nitrogen-rich organic molecules in comet Wild 2 is the latest addition to the set of bits and pieces useful to the origin of life that has been found in comets.
These discoveries were made by members of the Stardust Preliminary Examination Team, a group of scientists who have been studying the samples returned from comet Wild 2 by NASA's Stardust spacecraft in January 2006.

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