Latest Stardust Stories

WASHINGTON, May 25, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- NASA will launch a spacecraft to an asteroid in 2016 and use a robotic arm to pluck samples that could better explain our solar system's formation and how life began. The mission, called Origins-Spectral Interpretation-Resource Identification-Security-Regolith Explorer, or OSIRIS-REx, will be the first U.S. mission to carry samples from an asteroid back to Earth. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) "This is a...

By Daniel Stolte, University of ArizonaThe discovery of minerals requiring liquid water for their formation challenges the paradigm of comets as "dirty snowballs" frozen in time.For the first time, scientists have found convincing evidence for the presence of liquid water in a comet, shattering the current paradigm that comets never get warm enough to melt the ice that makes up the bulk of their material."Current thinking suggests that it is impossible to form liquid water inside of a...

DENVER, March 25, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- NASA's Stardust spacecraft, built and flown by Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT), sent its last transmission to Earth at 4:33 p.m. PDT (7:33 p.m. EDT) Thursday, March 24, shortly after depleting fuel and ceasing operations. During a 12-year period, the venerable spacecraft collected and returned comet material to Earth and was reused after the end of its prime mission in 2006 to observe and study another comet during February 2011. The Stardust team...

PASADENA, Calif., March 25, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- NASA's Stardust spacecraft sent its last transmission to Earth at 7:33 p.m. EDT Thursday, March 24, shortly after depleting fuel and ceasing operations. During an 11-year period, the venerable spacecraft collected and returned comet material to Earth and was reused after the end of its prime mission in 2006 to observe and study another comet during February 2011. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) The...

After 12 years of providing NASA with lessons about our solar system, the Stardust spacecraft has sent its last commands to burn off all its fuel. In its final moments, the spacecraft continues to teach us. The "burn to depletion maneuver was designed to fire Stardust's rockets until insufficient fuel remains to continue, all the while downlinking data on the burn to Earth some 312 million kilometers (194 million miles) away," released NASA in a press release.Based on the Stardust-NExt team's...

NEW YORK, Feb. 17, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Only days before the NASA Stardust spacecraft beamed home comet photos long awaited by astronomers, other researchers revealed the factors that motivated citizens to volunteer without pay to examine more than a million images of space dust captured by the spacecraft's predecessor. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20091027/NY99197LOGO ) The team of researchers headed by Polytechnic Institute of New York University (NYU-Poly) Assistant Professor...

NASA's Stardust spacecraft returned new images of a comet showing a scar resulting from the 2005 Deep Impact mission. The images also showed the comet has a fragile and weak nucleus.The spacecraft made its closest approach to comet Tempel 1 on Monday, Feb. 14, at 8:40 p.m. PST at a distance of approximately 111 miles. Stardust took 72 high-resolution images of the comet. It also accumulated 468 kilobytes of data about the dust in its coma, the cloud that is a comet's atmosphere. The craft is...

PASADENA, Calif., Feb. 15, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- NASA's Stardust spacecraft returned new images of a comet showing a scar resulting from the 2005 Deep Impact mission. The images also showed the comet has a fragile and weak nucleus. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO ) The spacecraft made its closest approach to comet Tempel 1 on Monday, Feb. 14, at 8:40 p.m. PST at a distance of approximately 111 miles. Stardust took 72 high-resolution images of the comet. It also...

DENVER, Feb. 15, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- NASA's Stardust-NExT spacecraft made a Valentine's Day deep-space rendezvous with an object it had been seeking for the past four-and-a-half years. The Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT)-built spacecraft flawlessly executed its mission and performed a flyby of comet Tempel 1 at 9:39 p.m. MT yesterday. Stardust made its closest approach of the nucleus of the comet at a distance of 111 miles (178 km) and was traveling a relative speed of 24,300 mph (10.9 km per...

NASA has rescheduled the news conference about the Stardust-NExT comet flyby for 12:30 p.m. PST (3:30 p.m. EST) today. The briefing will release images and early data from the comet encounter and will be carried live on NASA Television and the agency's website.The participants are:-Ed Weiler, NASA's associate administrator, Science Mission Directorate, Washington-Joe Veverka, Stardust-NExT principal investigator, Cornell University-Tim Larson, Stardust-NExT project manager, NASA's Jet...