Stardust Returns as a NASA Triumph

Stardust has been a hotel in Las Vegas, a song by Hoagy Carmichael and part of a lesser known Glam Rocker’s stage name (Alvin Stardust was born Bernard Jewry – which explains the name change). Now, though, it is one of NASA’s most impressive robotic missions. It proves once again that humanity’s place in space is on Earth, sitting at mission control.

The Stardust mission sent a probe on a three billion mile roundtrip to visit a comet and bring back a small sample of the primordial stuff (as Dr. Sagan would have said) that composed the early solar system. The 100 pound canister fill of aerogel (a strong, lightweight silica glass that is 99.8 percent air and looks like frozen smoke) and comet landed in the Utah desert around 3 am local time Sunday.

The project began on February 7, 1999 when a Delta rocket shot the probe into space. In January of 2004, the probe encountered Comet Wild 2, which is believed to have originated in the Kuiper Belt, a sort of three dimensional halo of ice and dust around the solar system. Project Manager Tom Duxbury said, “We pushed about every frontier you can think of. We went half way to Jupiter on solar cells. Coming back into Earth faster than anything has ever done before. So many, many things that we did in this little project.” In other words, lots could have gone wrong, but nothing did.

The scientific world will spend the next couple of decades, and probably longer, studying what came back. By any measure, this mission worked. At $212 million, it was a bargain. Principal investigator Don Brownlee told the media, “The last Apollo mission was 1972. And people are still discovering very exciting things on the Apollo samples. Samples are a resource that are unending. And so unless we consume all the samples, they will certainly be studied decades from now.”

The same cannot be said of the manned projects NASA has launched since 1972. Seven years in space, the radiation and the needs of the human body mean this project couldn’t have been done by people. Not at any price, let alone $212 million. With the samples lasting through the lifetimes of the current research team, it is hard to say anything from the International Space Station measures up. Now, can the big shots at NASA please start playing to their strengths and let the space station burn up while mankind saves the Hubble telescope?


© Copyright 2006 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent.
Produced using Fedora Linux.

Home