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Engineers monitoring radio signals from the spacecraft erupted in cheers and applause as the moment of closest approach came and went with little or no degradation in the stream of data flowing back to Earth. That steady signal meant Stardust had survived its unprecedented encounter with comet Wild-2, the culmination of a five-year voyage spanning more than 3 billion kilometres since blastoff in February 1999.
"We're a jubilant crowd!" said Tom Duxbury, Stardust project manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "Everything so far has gone by the book. ... Life is tremendously good. We've flown through the worst of it and we're still in contact with our spacecraft. ... The encounter just went off tremendously."
"The science that this project is returning will be unprecedented." Said Duxbury. From this point on, it's all downhill for the Stardust team as the spacecraft falls back into the inner Solar System. If all goes well, a small re-entry pod carrying the captured comet stuff will slam into Earth's atmosphere in January 2006, parachuting to a touchdown in Utah.
From there, the priceless cargo will be flown to the Johnson Space Centre in Houston where eager scientists will begin chemical analyses of the captured particles. The results are expected to answer long-standing questions about the cloud of dusty debris that coalesced to form the Solar System and whether comets helped seed planet Earth with water and the organic building blocks of life.
More info: Space Flight Now
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