This is turning into a great month with all these science posts here, so I had to throw this one in also...
http://planetary.org/news/2006/0113_Stardust_Comet_Mission_Returns_Home.htmlFaster than a speeding bullet -- actually, more than 10 times faster than a speeding bullet, Stardust will conclude its 7-year, 4.63 billion kilometer (2.88 billion mile) round-trip journey to comet Wild 2 Sunday, January 15, Pacific Standard Time (PST), making an historic re-entry in the wee morning hours to drop its precious comet cargo in the Utah desert well before dawn.
“We will light up the sky,” Tom Duxbury, Stardust project manager, told journalists at a pre-landing press briefing held yesterday at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah.
Traveling at 12.8 kilometers or 8 miles per second – fast enough to go from San Francisco to Los Angeles in one minute, Stardust’s re-entry will set a new standard as the fastest returning spacecraft, surpassing the record set in May 1969 during the return of the Apollo X command module. It is set to break through Earth’s atmosphere just before 2 a.m. Pacific Standard Time (PST) / 3 a.m. Mountain Standard Time (MST) / 10 Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) over the Pacific Ocean. “It will move over the west coast of northern California and will light the sky from California through central Oregon and on through Nevada and Idaho and into Utah,” Duxbury elaborated.
The sample return capsule – which weighs 45.7 kilograms (101 pounds) and resembles a mini Apollo capsule -- is to land approximately 15 minutes after re-entering, at about 2:12 a.m. PST / 3:12 a.m. MST/ 10:12 GMT on the United States Air Force’s Utah Test and Training Range, located southwest of Salt Lake City.
People below the general flightpath should be able to witness Stardust’s return in the pre-dawn sky, Duxbury added. To them, the Stardust capsule will appear as a point of light, passing like a meteor over those northwestern states to its landing at the test range. [The best opportunities for viewing the re-entry will be along Highway 80 between Carlin, Nevada and Elko, Nevada and further east to the Utah border, where the capsule's front side can be observed before it passes over observers on the ground.]
“We are nearing the end of quite a fantastic voyage – our spacecraft has traveled further than anything from Earth ever has – and come back,” Stardust Principal Investigator Don Brownlee of the University of Washington, Seattle, reflected yesterday. “We went half-way to Jupiter to meet the comet and collect samples from it. But the comet actually came in from the outer edge of the solar system, out beyond the orbit of Neptune, out by Pluto,” he added. Wild 2 (pronounced Vilt two) is believed to hail from the Kuiper belt, a band of cosmic debris that orbits the Sun beyond Neptune and Pluto.
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Lots more info at the link above...
Stephen
Topic: StarDust (Read 974 times)