Stardust Apparently Successful

Naomi_the_butterfly writes "The Stardust mission, a craft launched in February 1999, just concluded its encounter with comet Wild 2 at 11:40:35 am PST. The encounter went without a hitch, with about 72 images taken and comet coma (tail) dust collected! The first images will be downloaded to JPL over between 1:30 and 2:30 pm, in time for a press conference at 3:00 pm PST. Today a comet, tomorrow Mars!" Space.com has a picture taken by the spacecraft.

Comments

Images

[deglr6328]

Images of the enounter may be found here along with live updated status reports here. Looking closely at the overexposed image on the bottom of the first page you can actually make out vapor jets emanating from the surface of Wild produced by the vaporizing ice and dust heated by the sun.

finaly!!

[crabpeople]

why use video when you can use......

http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/news/040102a.gif

ANIMATED GIFS!
seriously thats like the longest one ive ever seen. i could only get as far as the guy in the blue shirt and the old people in congress.

Re:finaly!!

[jim3e8]

NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day archive.

Re:Today a comet, tomorrow Mars

[CrowScape]

The grandparent's post was not about issuing in-flight corrections, but rather being able to know what went wrong so that future missions will not make the same mistake.

Re:Call a spade a spade

[kjd]

You question 'coma' but not the word 'comet' itself?

Comet comes from the Greek 'kometes' which means 'the hairy one' (according to Google). So naturally they used 'coma' to describe the 'hair'.

Re:"Apparently"?

[Wumpus]

really shows the author's knowledge of Soviet safety protocols.

Or his knowledge of the history of the Apollo program, for that matter. At least one astronaut, Jack Swigert, of the notoriously broken Apollo 13, died of cancer.

Note to self: Don't use conspiracy nuts as fact finders.

Re:This has been done before

[MissP]

The Russians brought back samples from the moon 3 times between 1970 and 1976 (and, um, how could it have been anything BUT automated?). The first was the Luna 16 mission: http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/database/MasterCatalog? sc=1970-072A

Re:Wanna see what this sucker looks like in 3D?

[Xzzy]

I think you set the two images too far apart, I have trouble "locking" the two images into the third ghost image in the middle.

Bring 'em closer an inch or so and it's much easier.

Aerogel

[Badboy Recovered]

for those of you who have never heard of it, google it. by far one of the more interesting things i learned from reading about this mission.

Vietnam Memorial Names Aboard

[Elonka]

A little-known fact is that this probe is also carrying a chip which contains all of the names from the Vietnam War Memorial in DC.

The idea that the names of those fallen soldiers are mixing with stardust today, has been giving me a warm fuzzy feeling. :)

Cool, reusable tech in Stardust probe

[PGillingwater]

There's a nice PDF link which gives some excellent background on the Stardust mission.

Some points of interest for /.ers:

1) They use Aerogel to collect the dust for return
2) The Dust Analyzer was based on a design used for the ESA's Giotto probe
3) The navigation camera used was left-over from the Voyager mission of 1977, combined with a left-over sensor head from the Gallileo mission launched in 1989
4) The CPU is a hardened version of the Macintosh PowerPC chip, known as the RAD6000, which runs at between 5 and 20 MHz. It has 128 Mb of RAM, and 3 Mb of PROM.
5) The operating system uses only 20% of its RAM for its own use -- the rest is dedicated to experiments, including 75 Mb for images from the navigation camera
6) The radio transponder is a relict of the Cassini mission to Saturn

Follow the first link for lots more nice tech details.