This is Stardust, NASA’s comet hunter about 312,000,000km from Earth. Later today, they’ll order her main engines to burn to depletion, accelerating “anywhere from 2.5 to 35.2 metres per second”, and turn off her radio. But why?
On February 14 NASA’s Stardust spacecraft had a close encounter with the comet Temple 1. For the first time in history, we got to visit a comet two times—a strange opportunity that allowed scientist to see how these space objects change.
In 2006, a NASA spacecraft returned to Earth with samples that scientists hoped might contain cosmic dust, a byproduct of star formation. They let the public look for the elusive particles online. A squinting citizen might have just found one.
