Latest Stardust Stories

Rating: 8 Upon reflection of Paul Weller's respectable career, it makes little sense why he would feel any incentive to release a sprawling album like "22 Dreams," the lengthiest and arguably most stylistically diverse album of his 30-plus-year span as a songwriter. After all, anyone with even the slightest understanding of the Modfather's illustrious discography as both a solo artist and frontman of the Jam and the Style Council would already recognize him as being one of the most...

NASA researchers and scientists from the United States, Germany and Japan have found a new mineral in material that likely came from a comet.The mineral, a manganese silicide named Brownleeite, was discovered within an interplanetary dust particle, or IDP, that appears to have originated from comet 26P/Grigg-Skjellerup. The comet originally was discovered in 1902 and reappears every 5 years. The team that made the discovery is headed by Keiko Nakamura-Messenger, a space scientist at NASA's...

Stardust Spacecraft is currently 208 million miles from EarthWhile their spacecraft's journeys may have taken it more than halfway to Jupiter, members of the Stardust team have lately been doing some roaming of their own. A great deal of the traveling has been to accept awards and receive the accolades of their aerospace and science-oriented peers. Among the honors the Stardust team has received: the Aviation Week & Space Technology Program Excellence Award; the Popular Mechanics'...

Contrary to expectations for a small icy body, much of the comet dust returned by the Stardust mission formed very close to the young sun and was altered from the solar system's early materials.When the Stardust mission returned to Earth with samples from the comet Wild 2 in 2006, scientists knew the material would provide new clues about the formation of our solar system, but they didn't know exactly how.New research by scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and collaborators...

A former comet-slamming spacecraft will swing by Earth on New Year's Eve before starting a two-and-a-half-year journey to Comet Hartley 2. Deep Impact will first spend six months using the larger of its two telescopes to search for Earth-sized planets around five candidate stars. The second part of its extended mission involves a flyby of Hartley 2 that allows close observations of the comet's features. "It's exciting that we can send the Deep Impact spacecraft on a new...

The flash! The dazzle! The front page of the New York Times! Two years ago, NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft dropped an 820 lb copper projectile onto Comet Tempel 1, unleashing an explosion that made headlines around the world.Exploding comets tend to have that effect. But how many people know what happened after the blast? The surprising answer is none--not even NASA.Deep Impact's prime mission was to punch a hole in Tempel 1 and look inside, giving researchers their first glimpse of a comet's...

Observational and theoretical studies of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, the target of ESA's Rosetta mission, are building a detailed portrait of the comet's nucleus as it travels around the Sun.Observations of the comet using the 8.2 m-ESO Very Large Telescope (VLT) show an irregularly-shaped object that is about 4.6 kilometres in diameter with a rotational period of 12 hours 49 minutes.  Ms Cecilia Tubiana, who will be presenting results at the second European Planetary Science Congress...

LOS ANGELES -- NASA said Tuesday it is recycling two used spacecraft to lead new robotic missions to study comets and planets around other stars. The encore performances of the Deep Impact and Stardust probes allow the space agency to further its solar system exploration for a fraction of the cost it would take to start a mission from scratch.Both spacecraft successfully completed their primary missions to two different comets and their discoveries have helped scientists understand how the...

A menacing lump of rock and dust in space called 10195 (1999 RQ36) would barely be noticed except for two crucial facts: First, "It's a treasure trove of organic material, so it holds clues to how Earth formed and life got started," said Joseph Nuth of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. Second, it regularly crosses Earth's orbit, so it might impact us someday. Nuth is Project Scientist for the proposed OSIRIS mission, which will "return a pristine sample of the...

Washington, D.C. "“ Eleven months ago, NASA's Stardust mission touched down in the Utah desert with the first solid comet samples ever retrieved from space. Since then, nearly 200 scientists from around the globe have studied the minuscule grains, looking for clues to the physical and chemical history of our solar system. Although years of work remain to fully decipher the secrets of comet Wild 2, researchers are sure that it contains some of the most primitive and exotic chemical...