The Stardust probe landed safely in Utah this morning, bringing with it cometary and interstellar particles collected over a nearly 3 billion mile journey. After the recovered capsule is returned to Houston, it will be opened and the process of analysis will begin. Home PC users are being asked to help with locating and identifying recovered particles.
NASA’s Stardust sample return mission returned safely to Earth when the capsule carrying cometary and interstellar particles successfully touched down at 2:10 a.m. Pacific time (3:10 a.m. Mountain time) in the desert salt flats of the U.S. Air Force Utah Test and Training Range.
“Ten years of planning and seven years of flight operations were realized early this morning when we successfully picked up our return capsule off of the desert floor in Utah,” said Tom Duxbury, Stardust project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. “The Stardust project has delivered to the international science community material that has been unaltered since the formation of our solar system.”
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The sample return capsule’s science canister and its cargo of comet and interstellar dust particles will be stowed inside a special aluminum carrying case to await transfer to the Johnson Space Center, Houston, where it will be opened. NASA’s Stardust mission traveled 2.88 billion miles during its seven-year round-trip odyssey. Scientists believe these precious samples will help provide answers to fundamental questions about comets and the origins of the solar system.
My money’s on finding traces of the same heavy elements we see on our own planet and in spectrographs of astronomical objects throughout the universe.
Read NASA’s Comet Tale Draws to a Successful Close in Utah Desert for the entire story.
Over six hundred light years from Earth, in the constellation Aquarius, a sun-like star is dying. Its last few thousand years have produced the Helix Nebula (NGC 7293), a well studied and nearby example of a Planetary Nebula, typical of this final phase of stellar evolution. Emission in this infrared Spitzer Space Telescope image of the Helix comes mostly from the nebula’s molecular hydrogen gas. The gas appears to be clumpy, forming thousands of comet-shaped knots each spanning about twice the size of our solar system. Bluer, more energetic radiation is seen to come from the heads with redder emission from the tails, suggesting that they are more shielded from the central star’s winds and intense ultraviolet radiation. The nebula itself is about 2.5 light-years across. The Sun is expected to go through its own Planetary Nebula phase … in another 5 billion years.
LONG NIGHTS MOON: 
10 YEARS OF SOHO: Where would we be without SOHO? The orbiting Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) keeps a ’round-the-clock eye on the sun and is crucial to space weather forecasting. Thousands of our readers have witnessed auroras only because SOHO spotted an incoming CME [coronal mass ejection] in time for us to issue an alert.