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
