.UW Astronomy Professor Donald Brownlee already knows where he'll be sometime in January 2006: on a dry Utah lakebed, helping to recover an extremely precious cargo returning to Earth from 93 million miles out in space.
Last November, NASA picked Brownlee's Stardust project to become the world's first sample-return mission to outer space since the Apollo moon program.
The seven-year Stardust mission's unmanned, 500-pound spacecraft will be launched in February 1999. "With its solar panels folded up, two people could carry it--it would fit into the back seat of your car," marveled Brownlee of the craft, to be built by Lockheed-Martin Astronautics, Denver.
Its mission: to be the first to retrieve and return to Earth samples of interstellar dust preserved in a comet Wild-2--remnants of the earliest moments of the universe that could tell much about the formation of planets and stars.
"Comets are pristine samples of the actual solid materials from which the solar system formed," explained Brownlee, principal investigator of the $199.6-million Stardust project. "They were compacted along with ice to form these cometary bodies and preserved for 4.5 billion years at the far reaches of our solar system--whereas on Earth, all these primitive, original materials were destroyed by natural geologic processes long ago." END
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