Pasadena (California), Jan 07: Nasa's stardust spacecraft was on its way home after surviving a virtual flyby shooting as it plowed through a hail of dust particles to successfully collect samples of a comet and take unprecedented pictures. An estimated 10 million particles of dust traveling at six times the speed of a rifle bullet blasted the spacecraft as it flew past the comet wild 2, members of the mission said yesterday. Stardust shot 72 black-and-white pictures of the dark nucleus of wild 2 during Friday's swoop past the frozen ball of ice and rock. "These are showing us views of another world - a world we've never seen the likes of," project manager Tom Duxbury said as he narrated for reporters at Nasa's jet propulsion laboratory a brief movie stitched together from the images of the comet's 5.3-kilometer diameter nucleus.
To get its unprecedented close-ups, stardust flew through the comet's coma, the fuzzy shroud of gas and dust that envelops it. The images show features on the comet's pocked surface as small as 19.8 meters across, seen from about 240 kilometers away, said Ray Newburn, a member of the stardust imaging team. The largest of the particles to strike stardust's twin bulletproof bumpers was probably the size of a .22-caliber round, scientists said. The spacecraft fired its thrusters about 1,200 times to compensate for the battering it received during the flyby, said Benton Clark, of Lockheed Martin space systems, the probe's builder.
Bureau Report