Speaker: Dr. Scott Sandford
NASA’s Stardust spacecraft was a Discovery class mission that was launched on 7 February 1999 with a primary mission to collect (i) dust samples from the coma of Comet Wild-2 and (ii) samples of interstellar dust passing through our Solar System, and return them to Earth for analysis.  The primary mission was successfully completed on 15 January 2006 when the sample return capsule landed in Utah, making it the first human-made object ever to leave the Earth-Moon system and return to Earth.  The comet samples were captured in a low-density material called aerogel as the spacecraft passed through the comet’s coma at over 6 kilometers per second (about 13,700 mph).  Studies of the returned samples showed that the comet, which is thought to have formed in the outer parts of our Solar System, contained materials that formed throughout the forming planetary system, including materials that were made very near the Sun.  This surprising result indicates that the protoplanetary nebula from which our planetary system formed must have been an extremely turbulent environment that mixed materials throughout the nebula.