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Article Archive
Encountering A Comet:
The year began with Stardust-NExT spacecraft flying by Earth in a maneuver called a "gravity assist." On January 15, the spacecraft came within 9,200 km (5,700 miles) of California as it flew by. Many interplanetary missions use an Earth gravity assist, or EGA, to change their orbit by using the Earth's gravity to accelerate the spacecraft. Our January flyby was designed to set Stardust-NExT on course to a Tempel-1 encounter in February 2011.
+ Read full story by Kevin Gilliland.
Los Angles Times
August 18, 2009
Ingredient for life detected in comet dust
It is the first time an amino acid has turned up in comet material, bolstering the idea that the building blocks of biology are 'ubiquitous' in space.
By John Johnson Jr.
Showing that the ingredients for life in the universe may be distributed far more widely than previously thought, scientists have found traces of a key building block of biology in dust snatched from the tail of a comet.
Scientists at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., have uncovered glycine, the simplest amino acid and a vital compound necessary for life, in a sample from the comet Wild 2. The sample was captured by NASA's Stardust spacecraft, which dropped it into the Utah desert in 2006.
+ Read article
NASA Study Finds New Kind of Organics in Stardust Mission
A team of scientists found a new class of organics in comet dust captured from comet Wild 2 in 2004 by NASA's Stardust spacecraft.
The discovery is described in a technical paper, "Organics Captured from Comet Wild 2 by the Stardust Spacecraft," in the Dec. 15 issue of Science Express, the online edition of the journal Science.
+ Read entire article
