NASA’s Stardust sample-return mission returned safely to Earth early Saturday morning when the capsule carrying interstellar and comet particles successfully touched down in the salt flats of the U.S. Air Force Utah Test and Training Range. Tom Duxbury, Stardust project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory stated, “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. The Stardust project has delivered to the international science community material that has been unaltered since the formation of our solar system.” Scientists believe that the comet samples and interstellar stardust particles will reveal heretofore unknown facts about the origin of comets and our solar system.
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Image taken from here.
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