William Atkins
Tuesday, 18 August 2009 19:30
Science -
Space
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A NASA scientist announced on August 16, 2009, that NASA’s Stardust spacecraft has returned sample material to Earth from comet Wild 2. The sample contains the first signs within an extraterrestrial body of an amino acid, which is used by organisms to make proteins: a building block of life.
The amino acid found by the
Stardust spacecraft is called glycine. Microscopic traces of the amino acid was discovered within a sample returned by the Stardust spacecraft after collecting material from the tail of comet Wild 2.
At the time of collection of the sample (January 2004), the spacecraft and the comet were approximately 390 million kilometers (242 million miles) from Earth.
The NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory developed the Stardust spacecraft. It was launched on February 7, 1999 for a round trip of almost five billion kilometers (three billion miles) to explore the comet Wild 2 and a distant flyby of the asteroid 5535 Annefrank.
The mission has the distinction of being the first sample-return space mission to collect cosmic dust and return it to Earth. (Other missions have returned sample materials from the Moon and the Sun.)
Stardust collected the comet material using its aerogel collector. The spacecraft then traveled back to Earth and returned the sample material, inside a small capsule, from comet Wild 2 on January 15, 2006.
The capsule landed in the Great Salt Lake in Utah, while the Stardust spacecraft, itself, continued on to another mission in space: to visit the comet Tempel 1. Its mission has been renamed New Exploration of Tempel 1 (NExT).
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