Stardust: first sample return from a comet
Stardust: primer retorno de muestras de un cometa
- Date
- 15 de enero de 2006 · confidence high
- Place
- Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, United States
- Credited to
- NASA / JPL (Donald Brownlee, principal investigator)
- Field
- Movement
What was discovered
The probe flew through the coma of comet Wild 2 in 2004 and captured dust in aerogel, which it returned to Earth in a capsule in 2006. The samples contained minerals formed close to the early Sun and glycine, an amino acid.
The glycine was announced in 2009. The capsule landed in the Utah desert, but the mission was based at JPL.
What it led to
- proof that material from the inner solar system travelled outward
- amino acids in comets as ingredients of prebiotic chemistry
- the aerogel capture technique