Stardust: Mission accomplished

January 15, 2005 - The Sample Return Capsule of the Stardust Mission with the comet dust particle was successfully landing in the desert in Utah, USA. Meanwhile a helicopter safe the capsule and bring the samples to a special laboratory of NASA.

The final 400,000 kilometers of the mission was taken in just 16 hours and 27 minutes. It took the Apollo astronauts about three days to make the same journey.

706,000 kilometers from the earth away the space probe fired for 58.5 seconds its thrusters for a final maneuver to place it on a precise path to reach its landing target.

Four hours after the released by the Stardust spacecraft, the capsule was entering Earth's atmosphere at an altitude of 125 kilometers over Northern California with a velocity of 46,440 kilometers per hour.

The Stardust sample return capsule was released a drogue parachute at an altitude of approximately 32 kilometers and the main parachute was deployed at an altitude of 3 kilometers.

"Ten years of planning and seven years of flight operations were realized early this morning when we successfully picked up our return capsule off of the desert floor in Utah," said Tom Duxbury, Stardust project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "The Stardust project has delivered to the international science community material that has been unaltered since the formation of our solar system."

"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."

Mission overview: