"We flew through the most difficult part of it and we are still in contact with the spacecraft," said the project manager.
Avi Blizovsky
Friday 2/1/04 time 21:15
A short message on Stardust's website:
A successful passage near the comet
All signs point to the Stardust spacecraft making a successful flyby of comet Wild-2 today. The data check is in progress.
Walla site! Adds from the Reuters news agency: "The American space agency spacecraft survived its encounter this evening with the tail of the comet "Wild-2". In the NASA control room, the completion of this phase of the operation was received with high praise. "We flew through the most difficult part of it and we are still in contact with the spacecraft," said the project manager.
"The Stardust spacecraft survived the eight-minute encounter with the comet's tail and collected the samples as planned."
Stardust is preparing to meet the comet at this time
02/1/2004 שעה 21:40
An American research spacecraft entered tonight (22:40 - Israel time) into the tail of the comet "Wild-2" and photographed it. The Voice of Israel reported that the "Stardust" spacecraft is expected to be about 300 kilometers from the star itself.
Advertisement "Wild-2" is now about 400 million kilometers from Earth. The spacecraft is supposed to collect about 1,000 samples of ice, dust and rocks from the star's tail using a robotic arm. Upon completion of its mission, the spacecraft will make its way to Earth and in two years will drop the sample container, which is planned to land in the state of Utah in the USA and then the researchers will be able to study its contents. The scientists hope to learn from the samples about how the universe and the stars formed. This is the first time that a spacecraft collects samples from a comet during its flight.
CNN reported that the "Stardust" tonight completes a four-year flight in space and a distance of 3.7 billion kilometers. NASA hopes that the spaceship, the size of a refrigerator, will survive the close encounter with the star's tail whose fragments may hit the spaceship at a higher speed than rifle bullets. "Like in 'Star Trek' we raised the shields", explained the experiment manager.
The Stardust spacecraft will meet Comet Wild 2 at 21:40 p.m
Operation Stardust: How NASA's spacecraft will collect the dust from the comet's heart
The Stardust spacecraft is only a few hours away from its rendezvous with comet Wild-2. The spacecraft has been traveling in space for five years to reach a position where it will be a total of 300 kilometers from the "dirty ice ball".
StarSat will image the object and collect particles flowing out of the core and return them to Earth in 2006.
The scientists believe that the samples will reveal new details not only about the composition of the comets but also about the early history of the solar system.
The encounter with the comet is scheduled for 19:40 GMT on Friday when it will pass by the comet which has a nucleus diameter of 5.4 kilometers at a speed of 21,960 kilometers per hour.
In recent decades, spacecraft have passed quite close to comets and provided us with great data," said Dr. Don Brownlee, from the University of Washington, the principal investigator of the Stardust operation. "However, Stardust marks the first time that we also collected samples from a comet to bring them to Earth for research," he added.
dangerous moments
Dr. Simon Green from the Open University, part of the British team involved in the mission, said that it has been agreed for weeks that the distance to which the spacecraft will approach, about 300 kilometers from the comet, is the closest safe place that can be provided without destroying the spacecraft. The mission is operated by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, where researchers hold their breath during the critical approach.
Dr. Don Brownlee told the BBC that these will be tense moments for the Stardust crew members: "We are very excited, we have been in space for five years and we have traveled 3 billion kilometers, all for this day, to collect the sample."
There is an element of risk here. If we get hit by a passing rock it could cause problems. We believe that we are quite protected from this but we will be shooting moments a few minutes later, after the peak approach.
British scientists based in Pasadena will analyze the results from the spacecraft's control systems after the encounter, to get immediate information about the collected particles.
Dr. Neil McBride explains the ultimate goal: "We are trying to collect comet dust particles from the tail, near the nucleus, and return them to Earth. This is done using a sensor made of aerogel - glass with a very, very low density. "When the particles crash into the device, they will be caught by the airgel.
Faster than a rifle bullet
Tom Morgan, a scientist in the Stardust program on behalf of NASA said that the instruments on board the spacecraft will provide interesting data during the flight, but most of the interesting results will come in two years when the spacecraft completes its long journey back home to Earth and drops into the Utah desert.
"We have the opportunity to look directly into the most primitive material of the solar system, the material from which the planets were formed." said.
The director of the Stardust project, Tom Duxbury, described the spacecraft as a "wonderful machine" and said that it will face several risks in the coming hours. "The environment of Comet Wild-2 is a very harsh environment, and we are going to enter a storm of dust particles that hit us at six times the speed of a rifle bullet. This is the frontier of planetary research.”
Special shields were designed to protect the spacecraft from the dust. They will point in the direction the particles are coming from.
The dust collector, a robotic arm described as looking like a tennis racket, started operating in the last few days and is ready to receive the samples, which will be mixed inside the airgel. During the transition flight of the spacecraft, it will be under self-control. It will direct the cameras on board to the nucleus during the approach.
Tom Duxbury says that this will be "the most tense moment of the mission". Until that point, the spacecraft will send telemetry data at a high rate to Earth. After it rotates itself to position the camera towards the comet's nucleus, we will only get a sign that it is okay." said. "A few minutes after the flight, the spacecraft will automatically rotate itself back to Earth, point its powerful antenna towards Earth and start pouring data again.
"Only then will our white knuckles return to their normal color and we will begin to breathe properly. It's going to be very exciting."
His colleague Dr. Simon Green says that the results can provide us with a new window into the distant past. "Comets are made of ice and are very cold. They have been cold since they were created. The bear protects the materials they are made of from any process of heat, so that they have not changed since they were created, at the very beginning of the formation of the solar system. We have a kind of time capsule that shows us how things were 4.5 billion years ago."
The European Space Agency's ambitious mission to land a spacecraft on a comet - the Rosetta mission - is scheduled for launch in February 2004.
The mission to capture the comet
* Stardust was launched in February 1999 and will return to Earth in 2006
* The spacecraft will approach a distance of 260 kilometers from the nucleus of the tribe
* Its length is 4.8 meters, including the solar collectors
* Its total weight is around 385 kilograms
* The comet dust will be captured by the airgel insert (on the lower right side of the image).
