By Pat Reber Jan 18, 2006, 23:34 GMT
Washington - NASA Wednesday was 'ecstatic' and surprised over the condition and visibility of comet particles contained inside the tightly sealed canister that returned from a far flung corner of the solar system on Sunday.
A model of NASA's Stardust particle space capsule at the Dugway Proving Ground Sunday 15 January 2006 at Dugway, Utah. The capsule spent seven years in space and traveled over 2.88 billion miles collecting comet and interstellar dust particles before it's return to earth Sunday. EPA/George Frey
The Stardust capsule was opened late Tuesday at the Johnson Space Center in Houston after a top security transport from the Dugway Proving Grounds in western Utah, where it ended its seven-year 4- billion-kilometre journey to the comet Wild 2 on Sunday.
Bill Jeffs, a spokesman for the National Aeronautic and Space Administration (NASA), told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa that some of the particles were so large they could be seen by the naked eye. He said NASA officials were 'ecstatic' and 'surprised' by the condition of the particles.
The precious material has received extra secure handling because it's only the second time that an Earth-made vehicle has returned samples from outer space. The first time was the moon rocks from the 1972 Apollo mission.
Scientists expect to spend the next decade examining the comet pieces and stardust particles, hoping the research will shed light on the formation of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago.
While meteor and other space materials routinely crash through Earth's atmosphere and land on earth, they lack the pure form and quality of particles that have been floating in space possibly since before the solar system was formed, unsullied by Earth's atmosphere.
The 'Stardust' material is from the Comet Wild 2 - a comet that, like most comets, was out of reach for such a retrieval mission until it nearly crashed with Jupiter in 1974, which brought its orbit closer into the sun.
Steady exposure to solar heat causes most comets to disintegrate after hundreds or thousands of orbits, but Wild 2 was relatively pristine because it has made only five trips nearer to the sun, NASA said.
A lightweight substance called aerogel was specially designed for the mission to capture the fine comet particles and some smaller interstellar dust particles. The aerogel was mounted in ice-cube-tray like chambers mounted on a large tennis-racket-shaped surface.
The largest particles were expected to be to be no wider than the diameter of a single human hair, and others will be much smaller, NASA scientists said. The material may have to be studied atom by atom.
NASA is hoping for support from an army of internet volunteers to spend about 30,000 hours looking for the smaller interstellar dust particles in the aerogel through a web-based microscope. The particles are expected to have left small carrot-shaped trails in the aerogel, and be much fewer in number than the comet particles.
The reward for discoverers, who must pass a test on the internet to participate, will be the privilege of naming the dust grains they find.
Andrew Westphal, a University of California scientist who developed the technique to digitally scan the aerogel, developed special instruments to pull the grains out of the aerogel, which is 99.8 per cent air and looks like frozen smoke, NASA has said.
NASA took a 'risk' because it allowed Stardust to launch 'without anyone having a clue as to how to get particles out of the aerogel after it came back,' Westphal said last week.
In July, NASA successfully carried out another comet project - the crash of its Deep Impact probe into the surface of a comet and photographing of the results. But none of that debris was fetched back to Earth.
NASA is preparing to launch a probe on a nine to 14 year journey to Pluto - the most far out planet that's smaller than Earth's moon - to further explore the formation of the solar system.
The New Horizons probe is waiting in Cape Canaveral for suitable launch conditions. The launch window opened yesterday and lasts until February 14, but high winds, technical glitches and electricity outages forced postponement Tuesday and Wednesday.
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