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Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum
Stardust Aerogel
To capture cometary and interstellar dust samples, Stardust used a porous, silicon-based material called aerogel. The lightest solid ever created, aerogel has a spongelike structure that is 99 percent empty space and only slightly denser than air. The cometary particle grid (at the end of the capsule's arm) held 132 aerogel tiles. The interstellar particle grid (not included here) held 132 slightly thinner ones.
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