Project Stardust

Has anyone heard of this litttle spaceship?

"Stardust is the first spacecraft with the ability to retrieve samples obtained in deep space and return them to Earth for research."

Its supposed to take samples of a comet, if it works it will be pretty cool to find out whats on some of these comets

Um in future please try to post links to go with such post weeman.

(For the lazy people like me)

stardust.jpl.nasa.gov...



[Edited on 12-12-2003 by Kano]

sorry www.nasa.gov...

Here's another link. I was just reading about this when I saw this topic come up. What I don't understand is how they can be confident that the comet won't shoot out some gas and change it's trajectory in a way the spacecraft and Nasa didn't expect.

www.astronomy.com...

I remember seeing this on tv awhile back.It's gonna collect space dust particles from a comet with an aerogel screen.I don't think it's going to do a direct head-on collision with the comet but more like a graze of the tail of the comet.

I don't think it's going to do a direct head-on collision with the comet but more like a graze of the tail of the comet.

Right, but it still will be pretty close, and there could first be large debris, and second, a jet of gasses could nail it, disabling it or sending it off into the unknown. But this is all semantics, I just had a problem with the statement in the article that the scientists are confident they can track exactly what the comet will do.