[meteorite-list] Stardust Mission Nearly Complete

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Fri Jan 13 12:06:30 2006
Message-ID: <200601131704.k0DH4DY10850_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

http://rockymountainnews.com/drmn/local/article/0,1299,DRMN_15_4384900,00.html

Stardust mission nearly complete

Lockheed Martin spacecraft will land in Utah on Sunday
By Jim Erickson
Rocky Mountain News
January 13, 2006

NASA's Colorado-built Stardust spacecraft was on course and streaking
homeward Thursday, heading for a pre-dawn Sunday landing on the Utah
salt flats.

"We are nearing the end of quite a fantastic voyage," said the
University of Washington's Don Brownlee, the lead Stardust scientist.

Built by Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Jefferson County, Stardust
launched in 1999 and traveled 2.88 billion miles to snatch bits of a
comet and return them to Earth.

Thursday morning, the spacecraft was 957,000 miles from Earth, cruising
at 14,400 mph, according to NASA spokesman D.C. Agle.

The probe was performing flawlessly, and team members are confident that
"the navigators are really precisely going to place us exactly where we
need to be," said Tom Duxbury, Stardust project manager at NASA's Jet
Propulsion Laboratory.

Stardust is controlled by flight engineers at Lockheed Martin's Waterton
Canyon facility, southwest of Denver, and by JPL navigators in Pasadena,
Calif.

Weather permitting, helicopters will retrieve the capsule once it drifts
to the surface at about 10 mph. As of Thursday morning, the weather
forecast looked favorable, said Mike McGee, Stardust recovery operations
manager at Lockheed Martin.

If a storm moves in, snowcat-like treaded vehicles will go after the
capsule, which has a UHF radio beacon attached to its main parachute.

"We're looking forward to going out and retrieving this . . . regardless
of whatever the conditions may be and whatever's presented to us," McGee
said.

The main Stardust spacecraft will release the return capsule at 10:57
p.m. MST Saturday.

A clean, trouble-free separation is essential, so this will be a
nail-biting moment. When the capsule springs free, the mother ship will
jostle a bit in response. Lockheed Martin flight engineers will be able
to detect that motion, confirming a successful separation.

Minutes later, if skies are clear, Air Force trackers expect to catch
sight of the separated capsule from a telescope in Hawaii.

Using its global network of telescopes and radars, the trackers at
Cheyenne Mountain near Colorado Springs expect to see the capsule about
three minutes after separation, when the 101-pound cone will be more
than 64,000 miles from Earth.

"If the gods are smiling, it's possible," said Capt. Gil Griffin of the
1st Space Control Squadron at Cheyenne Mountain.

That distance is more than a quarter of the way to the moon.

A pretty good piece of eyeballing, considering the Stardust capsule is
just 32 inches across.

The Cheyenne Mountain team will follow the capsule until it slams the
top of Earth's atmosphere at 2:57 a.m. MST. That tracking data is vital,
because the Stardust team will have no radio contact with the capsule
during the entire four-hour free fall.

Cheyenne Mountain observations will help the Utah radar team, based at
Hill Air Force Base, refine its search for the capsule's re-entry point.
Hill radar and infrared sensors can detect the capsule once it's in the
atmosphere.

"We can give them a little bit better idea what it's doing, and it might
help Hill point its sensors in the right direction," Griffin said.

As it falls, the blunt-nosed capsule will accelerate to 28,860 mph,
making it the fastest manmade object ever to return to Earth. The
glowing cone will likely appear as a very bright pinpoint of pink-white
light for viewers in cloud-free regions of Northern California, the
Pacific Northwest, Nevada and Utah.

The spectacle will not be visible from Colorado.

"We come in over Northern California, and we will light up the sky,"
said Tom Duxbury, Stardust project manager at JPL.

Scientists expect the artificial meteor to be as bright as Venus for
about 90 seconds, according to Peter Jenniskens, a meteor astronomer
from the SETI Institute. Jenniskens helped organize a science team that
plans to observe Stardust's streak from a DC-8 airplane.

The capsule is scheduled to parachute onto the 2,624-square-mile Utah
Test & Training Range, southwest of Salt Lake City, at 3:12 a.m. MST
Sunday. Snug inside is a sample canister holding thousands of tiny
grains from Comet Wild 2.

The other big nail-biting moment of the re-entry and landing sequence:
parachute deployment.

In September 2004, another Lockheed Martin-built return capsule,
Genesis, slammed the salt flats at 193 mph after its parachutes failed
to open. The problem was traced to the improper installation of four
tiny switches, and the error was compounded when the company failed to
do a critical test that would have caught the mistake.

But the Stardust team is confident its capsule has "no such
discrepancies," Duxbury said Thursday during a news briefing at Utah's
Dugway Proving Grounds.
Received on Fri 13 Jan 2006 12:04:13 PM PST