Stardust Part II, Deep Impact Revisited?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Tuesday March 21, 2006 @04:59AM from the expensive-crash-test-dummy dept.

oneill40 writes to tell us New Scientist is reporting that NASA's Stardust spacecraft may be gearing up for another run. Stardust recently made the news by returning samples from the comet Wild 2 and is being looked at to pick up where the Deep Impact mission left off. From the article: "In addition to revealing the comet's interior composition, studies of the crater should shed light on the comet's structure and density. "If the impactor hit something that was very hard, it would produce a smaller crater than if it hit something very soft," Veverka told New Scientist."

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Good use of resources... by all204 · 2006-03-21 05:12 · Score: 2, Insightful

This seems to me like a good way to get some usefull science on the cheap. (Mind you 30 million is not all that cheap.) I always thought that just leaving a satellite like that just to 'drift' after all is said done, if it was still operational, was a waste.