January 14, 2006
Saturday

The Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska Fairbanks, has a professor and graduate student participating in the NASA hypervelocity re-entry campaign for the Stardust sample return capsule.

Artist's concept of Stardust's sample return capsule parachuting down to Earth. Image courtesy: NASA/JPL-Caltech

The Stardust vehicle will release the capsule into Earth's atmosphere at 12:56 a.m. on Sunday, January 15. The capsule, containing interstellar dust from the Wild 2 comet, will re-enter at a whopping 28,600 miles per hour. This re-entry is the fastest in NASA history.

Professor of Geophysics Hans Nielsen and graduate student Takashi Kammae, both of the Geophysical Institute, are monitoring the capsule's ablative heat shield during re-entry. The heat shield has never been flown before, but is designed to absorb the intense heat generated during re-entry into the atmosphere. If it performs well, it's engineering could be replicated for return vehicles that contain crews. Nielsen and Kammae will monitor the heat shield aboard NASA's DC-8 aircraft, an airborne laboratory full of instruments. There, they will observe data collected by a high-speed imager, designed at the Geophysical Institute for auroral research.

"Our whole mission is to look at the engineering of the return capsule," Nielsen said. "This offers an opportunity to observe how the heat shield performs under the specific conditions experienced during re-entry. The performance of the material inside the heat shield cannot be tested in the lab."

If the Stardust return capsule survives re-entry, it will allow scientists to work with comet dust. Cometary particles contain unique chemical and physical information that may reveal the history of the solar system.

Related Stories:

Craft returning to Earth with specks from space By KEAY DAVIDSON - Pieces of a comet and dust grains from beyond the solar system are headed toward Earth aboard NASA's Stardust spaceship, and if all goes well early Sunday morning, the conical craft should descend at nearly 29,000 mph in a blazing fireball over Utah before making a soft, predawn landing in the desert.

Space agency scientists are preparing to helicopter to the landing site to retrieve the capsule after it has parachuted to the ground. The site is located on an Air Force weapons test range. With luck, touchdown will occur at 10 mph. - More...
Friday - January 13, 2006

Scientists looking to volunteers to screen images for cosmic dots By KEAY DAVIDSON - Thousands of volunteers are lining up - online, that is - to help scientists analyze the first close-up pictures of primal matter from beyond our solar system.

Over the past seven years, invisibly small grains of interstellar dust have slammed into slabs of lightweight material aboard the Stardust robotic spacecraft, which is scheduled to fall back to Earth, landing in Utah, early Sunday. - More...
Friday - January 13, 2006

On the Web:

http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.html

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/stardust/multimedia/index.html

Source of News:

Geophysical Institute
http://www.gi.alaska.edu

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