Stardust has Valentine's date with comet Tempel 1

Call it an outer space version of the seven year itch. That’s how long it has been since the Stardust spacecraft split with comet Wild 2 and sent a thimble full of comet dust back toward Earth. Monday—Valentine’s Day—the craft, now dubbed Stardust NExT, has a date to pass within 125 miles of comet Tempel 1. It will snap some photos of the crater made when a probe from Deep Impact smacked into the comet in 2005 and do some other analysis of the comet and the particles flowing from it.

Prof. Don Brownlee.
UW photo by Mary Levin.

There’s a University of Washington connection to the mission. Prof. Don Brownlee of the UW Astronomy Department was the lead investigator for Stardust, and is a co-investigator for Stardust NExT. Vince Stricherz has a great article about the missions on the UW news site. Stricherz writes that Brownlee says there’s been a bit of luck involved in the wildly successful mission.

“Had we known at the time of the Wild 2 flyby how comets worked, we would have been even more nervous. There were jets at sonic speeds, and there were clumps of material coming out from the comet and breaking up,” he said. "That’s scary when you know a particle larger than a centimeter across – less than half an inch – could destroy the spacecraft, along with years of planning and work.”

Interestingly, the mission provides a double-double. It’s the first time the same spacecraft has visited two different comets, and the first time a comet has been visited by two different spacecraft. It will be the last encounter for Stardust, however. It is about out of fuel and will pretty much just coast on its own from here on out. It’s been a pretty effective craft, though. It has traveled about 3.6 billion miles since it was launched in 1999. It carried about 22 gallons of hydrazine fuel. That’s 164 million miles per gallon!