A US spacecraft's close encounter with a comet on Friday yielded startling images of the space body's pitted surface, scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said.
The Stardust spacecraft downloaded the images and other data hours after surviving a buffeting ride inside the tail of space dust in the wake of the Wild 2 comet. The spacecraft extended a collector mechanism with a grid-like pattern similar to that of a tennis racket to catch stardust from the streaking chunk of rock and ice that could give clues to how the solar system, and even life on Earth, began.
The stardust, or comet particles, were trapped in "aerogel" in the collector mechanism's grid. The grid will return to Earth in 2006 inside a capsule -- the first comet samples scientists will have the chance to study.
PHOTO: REUTERS
"The mission worked fantastically well. The comet cooperated better than we could have hoped for," said Don Brownlee, principal investigator for the Stardust mission.
As the Stardust team celebrated their mission's milestone, another team of scientists anxiously monitored the approach of the Spirit, the first of two Mars-bound rovers, which was set to touch down on the rugged Martian landscape yesterday.
The first images sent back from Stardust showed five gas columns that appeared to emanate from deep pits in Wild 2's deeply pockmarked surface. The pits themselves could be impact craters or sinkholes created by sublimation, when sunlight converts the comet's nucleus to gas.
Brownlee said scientists believed the pits discharged gas and dust at supersonic speed when exposed to the sun but went dormant when dark -- a hazard once depicted in the 1998 Bruce Willis space thriller Armageddon.
Preliminary data showed the bookshelf-sized spacecraft flew through two of the jets during its eight-minute ride inside Wild 2's coma, the gas and dust cloud surrounding its nucleus.
"I'm glad we didn't know those were there. We would have been terrified," Brownlee said.
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