At 2:40 P.M. EST, the 5.4-kilometer wide comet zoomed past Stardust at nearly 22,000 kilometers per hour, passing within 300 kilometers of the spacecraft. It was the closest Stardust had come to the Wild 2 since it first detected the comet with its navigation camera in mid-November and began transmitting images back to Earth.
Weve flown through the worst of it and were still in contact with our spacecraft, Stardust project manager Tom Duxbury said at approximately 2:50 PM during a live broadcast from the mission control room at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. Minutes later, NASAs space science chief, Ed Weiler, and JPL Center Director Charles Elachi filed into the control room to congratulate the team on a successful encounter.
NASA released a high-resolution black and white image of Wild 2 captured by Stardusts navigation camera during the encounter.
A little over three hours later, when Duxbury and Stardusts principle investigator, Donald Brownlee of the University of Washington, appeared at their first pre-encounter press conference, all indications were that the flyby had gone exceedingly well.
To the minute, it happened exactly as planned, Duxbury said. Were on our way out of the coma and on our way back to Earth.
Stardust is not the first spacecraft to visit a comet, but it is the first attempt to collect samples from any extraterrestrial body other than the moon and bring them back to Earth for analysis.
It was a very thrilling day for us, Brownlee said. We have successfully collected samples from a comet and are bringing them home Nine days earlier, on Dec. 24, Stardust extended a tennis racket-shaped particle catcher in preparation for the main point of the mission -- intercepting dust and debris shed by the comet as it whizzed by.
At about five minutes out from closest encounter, Wild 2 was literally sandblasting Stardust. The heavily shielded spacecraft snapped pictures at a rate of about once every 10 seconds, documenting its passage through Wild 2s coma, the region of dust and gas surrounding the comets nucleus.
Stardust is also equipped with two science instruments, both of which were very busy during the encounter.
Duxbury said that downloading all the data and imagery collected during the roughly 10 minute encounter would take about 30 hours. Stardust now begins its long journey back home. Once the spacecraft reaches nears Earth in 2006, it will jettison a sample canister that will enter the atmosphere and parachute down to the desert floor of the U.S. Air Force Utah Test and Training Range.
Duxbury said the samples on board Stardust date back more than 4.5 billion years and have remained virtually unchanged since the beginning of the solar system.
The $128.4 million spacecraft was built for NASA by Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver. It was launched Feb. 7, 1999 on a Delta 2 rocket.
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