NASA's Stardust Passes Moon, Just Hours Away From Earth Return

MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE
JET PROPULSION LABORATORY
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
PASADENA, CALIF. 91109 TELEPHONE (818) 354-5011
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov

D.C. Agle (818) 354-5011
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

Dwayne Brown/Merrilee Fellows (202) 358-1726/(818) 393-0754
NASA Headquarters, Washington


NEWS RELEASE 2006-008 January 14, 2006

NASA'S STARDUST PASSES MOON, JUST HOURS AWAY FROM EARTH RETURN

Less than one day of space travel separates Earth and history's first
comet sample return mission. Today at 9:30 a.m. Pacific time
(10:30 a.m. Mountain time), the Stardust spacecraft will cross the
moon's
orbit as the craft makes its way toward Earth.

The final 400,000 kilometers (249,000 miles) of the mission to return a

capsule containing cometary particles to Earth will take just 16 hours
and 27 minutes. It took the Apollo astronauts about three days to make
the
same journey.

"Our entire flight and recovery team will be watching this final leg of
our
flight with tremendous expectation as we implement a precise celestial
ballet
in delivering our capsule to Earth," said Stardust Project Manager Tom
Duxbury
of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "We feel like
parents
awaiting the return of a child who left us young and innocent, who now
returns holding answers to the most profound questions of our solar
system."

Prior to passing the moon's orbit, the spacecraft performed a final
maneuver
to place it on a precise path to reach its landing target on the Utah
Test
and Training Range. The burn, which took place yesterday at 8:53 p.m.
Pacific
time (9:53 p.m. Mountain time), took 58.5 seconds to complete and
changed the
spacecraft's velocity by 2.9 mph. At the time of the burn the
spacecraft was
about 706,000 kilometers (439,000 miles) from Earth.

NASA's Stardust mission has traveled about 4.5 billion kilometers (2.88

billion miles) during its seven year round-trip odyssey. It is a
journey that
carried it around the sun three times and beyond Mars and the asteroid
belt --
as far out as half-way to Jupiter. This cosmic voyage was in quest of
cometary
and interstellar dust particles, which scientists believe will help
provide
answers to fundamental questions about comets and the origins of the
solar
system.

"With the information we gathered during our encounter with comet Wild
2 in
Jan. 2004, Stardust has already provided us with some remarkable
science,"
said Dr. Don Brownlee, Stardust principal investigator at the
University of
Washington, Seattle. "With the return of cometary samples, we'll be
able to
work with the actual building materials of the solar system as they
were when
the solar system was formed. It will be a great day for science."

The last few hours of the Stardust mission will be filled with
significant
milestones. Today at about 8:15 p.m. Pacific time (9:15 p.m. Mountain
time),
mission controllers will command the spacecraft to begin the
computer-controlled sequence that will release the sample return
capsule.

At 9:56 p.m. Pacific time (10:56 p.m. Mountain time), the Stardust
spacecraft
will complete the sequence by severing the umbilical cables between
spacecraft
and capsule. One minute later, springs aboard the spacecraft will
literally
push the capsule away, putting it into its trajectory toward the Utah
Test
and Training Range. Fifteen minutes later, the "mother ship," the
Stardust
spacecraft, will perform a maneuver to enter orbit around the sun.

At 1:57 a.m. Pacific time (2:57 a.m. Mountain time), four hours after
being
released by the Stardust spacecraft, the capsule will enter Earth's
atmosphere
at an altitude of 125 kilometers (410,000 feet) over Northern
California. At
this point it will be 20 kilometers (12.43 miles) east of the Pacific
coast and
22 kilometers (13.67 miles) south of the Oregon-California border. The
velocity
of the sample return capsule as it enters Earth's atmosphere at 46,440
kilometers per hour (28,860 miles per hour) will be the greatest of any

human-made object on record. This will surpass the record set in May
1969
during the return of the Apollo 10 command module.

The Stardust sample return capsule will release a drogue parachute at
an
altitude of approximately 32 kilometers (105,000 feet). Once the
capsule has
descended to an altitude of about 3 kilometers (10,000 feet) at 2:05
a.m.
Pacific time (3:05 a.m. Mountain time), the main parachute will deploy.

The capsule is scheduled to land on the salt flats of the Utah Test and

Training Range at 2:12 a.m. Pacific time (3:12 a.m. Mountain time).

If weather conditions allow, the recovery team will be flown by
helicopter
to recover the capsule and fly it to the U.S. Army Dugway Proving
Ground, Utah,
for initial processing. If weather does not allow helicopters to fly,
special
off-road vehicles will be used to transport the recovery team to
retrieve the
capsule and return it to Dugway. The collector grid with cometary and
interstellar samples will be moved to a special laboratory at NASA's
Johnson
Space Center, Houston, where they will be preserved and studied by
scientists.

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the Stardust
mission
for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Lockheed Martin
Space
Systems, Denver, developed and operates the spacecraft.

For information about the Stardust mission on the Web,

visit http://www.nasa.gov/stardust .

For information about NASA and agency programs on the Web, visit

http://www.nasa.gov/home .

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