Comet Hunting Craft Closes on Target

JayBonci writes "According to a CNN article (also ScienceDaily), NASA's comet-hunting craft as part of the Stardust mission has sighted the comet early. This will make it easier to complete their plan of bringing a sample of the dust left behind by the comet's icy tail back home to earth. The mission homepage is here."

Comments

Re:ISS?

[isaac]

Wouldn't it be easier for the spacecraft to dock with the ISS, and return the samples to earth via. the next Soyuez capsule? It seems silly to need to build a craft capable of re-entry when it doesn't need to...

I'm certain it's considerably easier to build a capsule with an ablative heat shield capable of reentry than to build a craft with enough maneuvering fuel to match the orbit of ISS for a complicated recovery of the sort you propose.

With this design, the craft doesn't have to match orbits with a very small and very fast target - it just has to hit Utah. The latter is considerably easier, especially as there aren't any squishy humans inside who can't tolerate deceleration forces greater than a few dozen G.

-Isaac