Spacecraft Zips by Comet in NASA Close Encounter

Missed the love story of the space craft and the comet? No worries: JPL posted the close-encounter images as they were transmitted from Stardust here. 

On Valentine's Day, the Stardust spacecraft successfully zipped along side the Tempel I comet, collecting up to 72 images, stored in the spacecraft’s data center and now transmitted down to earth.  While the images were scheduled to be downloaded to JPL last night, a small glitch reversed their order of appearance and delayed the showing until today.

And to be clear: The Tempel 1 comet wasn’t NASA’s only bling last night.

JPL scientist Steve Chesley popped the question via his slideshow presentation to fellow scientist and comet team member Jana Pittichova.  

“I got engaged via PowerPoint,” Chesley said incredulously, smiling because she said yes.

Friends and family of JPL employees involved with the Stardust mission gathered in the von Karman auditorium to watch live feed from mission control and Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver, CO.  After a presentation orchestrated to both the ET and Darth Vader theme songs, audience members watched the action as it went down while partaking of Valentine’s Day cupcakes, beverages, and congratulatory hand shakes and nods of approval.

“Encounters happen at really strange times,'' Dr. Randii Wessen of JPL said of the night-time gathering.  He noted that JPL families often deal with lots of inconveniences and erratic schedules during missions. Guests could offers their congratulations to Stardust team members by signing a banner displayed at the event.

Stardust is not only a recycled spacecraft, but is also actually composed of used parts, including a 35 year old lens originally used in Voyager missions and a transponder from Cassini.  Launched in 1991, Stardust took its first spin through the cosmos to check out the comet Wild 2.  There, its screens and bumpers gathered comet particles and interstellar dust that was then stored in a capsule.  The capsule was dropped to earth in 2006, landing in Utah. 

Stardust completed its original mission, but still filled with fuel and capable of transmitting data and images, scientists reprogrammed the craft to take a spin around the Tempel 1 comet and check things out as part of the Stardust NexT mission.  The Tempel 1 comet was, in 2005, the subject of the mission Deep Impact designed to gather comet materials from the surface of a comet itself, not just the tail.

“We’re not smart enough to land on it yet,” noted Wessen, “so we had to bring the surface to the spacecraft.” 

Using a copper “bullet –copper is not found in or on comets–to strike Tempel 1, the craft was then able to collect particles of the plume.  But the “fluffy” cosmic material released during the impact didn’t settle while the craft was still nearby.  With Stardust taking a spin by now, scientist hope to catch a glimpse of the crater in order to better study the make-up of its mass.

According to Wessen, it is believed that comets could provide clues to the origin of life on earth.  Comets are seen as the “building blocks of solar systems,” he said, “and capable of bringing organic matter to earth.” 

Stardust successfully strode past Tempel 1, collecting particles and pictures.  Now, with two missions complete and only 6 pounds out of an original 187 pounds of fuel left, Stardust will be set free and allowed to continue its travel through the universe without any commitment to scientists on earth.  Mission control noted that the spacecraft would outlast the planet earth.

But, like Joe Verveka, Principal Investigator for Stardust NexT noted, “The hard thing is we have to wait to see all the goodies on board.”