Washington, Aug 08: NASA`s Stardust spacecraft, sent out to collect and return with the first samples from a comet, has begun collecting samples of cosmic dust, the US space agency has said. "If you look at the Milky Way on a dark night, you may see a black band stretching along the center. The band is interstellar dust blocking the light from distant stars. These are the particles that Stardust willbe collecting," the mission`s principal investigator, Don Brownlee, an astronomy professor at the University of Washington, Seattle said on Wednesday.
The dust passes through the universe like wind and includes most elements in the periodic table. The samples that Stardust began collecting on Monday contain particles smaller than one-hundredth the width of a strand of human hair, according to NASA.

In early 2004, the spacecraft is expected to rendezvous with the comet Wild 2 and collect particles up to 4.5 billion years old from the gas and dust that are escaping from inside the comet.
Bureau Report