Safe landing for comet dust samples

A SPACE capsule carrying the first comet dust samples to Earth parachuted to a pre-dawn landing in the Utah desert in the US yesterday, drawing cheers from elated scientists.

The touchdown capped a seven-year journey by NASA’s Stardust spacecraft, which zipped past a comet in 2004 to capture minute dust particles and store them in the capsule.

A helicopter recovery team located the capsule and transferred it to a clean room at the nearby Michael Army Air Field. The capsule will tomorrow be flown to the Johnson Space Centre in Houston where scientists will unlock the canister containing the cosmic particles.

Researchers believe about a million samples of comet and interstellar dust - most tinier than the width of a human hair - are locked inside.

The dust grains are believed to be pristine leftovers from the birth of the solar system, with some thought to be older than the sun.

Scientists hope to slice them into smaller bits and probe them under a microscope to directly learn about their chemical makeup and the processes that shaped the early universe.

The samples were gathered in 2004 from the comet Wild 2, a frozen body of ice and dust believed to have been formed billions of years ago. The spacecraft used a tennis racket-sized collector mitt to snag the particles.

The landing was a relief for scientists after the 2004 Genesis mission, when a craft carrying solar wind particles crashed and cracked open, contaminating the samples.

Launched in 1999, the Stardust spacecraft has travelled nearly 3 billion miles, looping around the sun three times.

The mission, managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, cost e175 million, and it isn’t over.

The mothership remains in permanent orbit around the sun, and NASA is considering sending it to another comet or asteroid, said Tom Duxbury, Stardust’s project manager.