Interestingly, this is something the aptly named Stardust Spacecraft did not originally set out to discover, but it’s a question that its findings have provoked. And it’s all thanks to including the lightest substance in the world onboard.
Stardust is known for its involvement with the Deep Impact NASA mission to the comet Tempel-1. However, this was not Stardust’s first mission, nor its primary one. Before Tempel 1, Stardust was out collecting data on another comet by doing something that no other probe before it had done.
An artist’s rendering of NASA’s Stardust / Stardust NExT spacecraft.Credit to NASA / JPL-Caltech.
Its mission was to travel to the Comet Wild 2, collect some of the material from its Coma, and then deliver the sample intact back to Earth. And given that this would involve catching particles that were moving at over 23,000 kilometers per hour, all without damaging them, this was no easy task.
We explore how Stardust managed to accomplish this incredible feat and uncover what Stardust’s findings taught us about cometary origins, as well as our own. In the late 1990s, Cometary Science was still in the early stages.
Although we had sent 6