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Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum
Stardust Microchips
As part of its public outreach program, Stardust carried two sets of microchips etched with the names of over a million people who responded to a "Send Your Name to a Comet" campaign. All 57,217 names on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., are also included. Two identical sets of two chips were flown. One set returned to Earth in this capsule; the other remains on the main spacecraft in space.
The "Stardust at Home" project allows direct public participation in mission science. People can search for particles within the aerogel collectors from their home computers, thereby aiding scientists studying the samples.
Comet Sample Return Capsule
Stardust was the first U.S. space mission dedicated solely to returning extraterrestrial material from outside the Earth-Moon orbit. Its main goal was to collect samples from Comet Wild 2 and interstellar dust. Launched on February 7, 1999, Stardust flew nearly 3 billion miles before returning to Earth and parachuting to a landing in the Utah desert on January 15, 2006.
The Stardust return system has six major components: a heat shield, backshell, sample canister, sample collector grid with aerogel (shown here deployed for flight as it passed through cometary clouds and rotated 180 degrees for display with the dust impact side facing toward the viewer), parachute system, and avionics. The samples were sealed in an aluminum canister encased in an exterior shell composed of ablative materials to protect them from the heat of re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere. Stardust made the fastest atmospheric entry of a human-made object at about 29,000 miles per hour.
Stardust also carried several other science packages that remain in space aboard the central vehicle. The sample return capsule brought back material that may date from the formation of the solar system. Those cometary and interstellar dust samples have gone to scientists worldwide, and results from their study are altering our understanding of the universe. One of the major scientific findings of the mission is that ice-rich comets also contain fragments of high temperature materials.
Transferred from NASA