Alright! Another attempt by NASA to bring a space craft to earth, hopefully with little impact. This is scheduled to land on the 15th early Sunday morning (3:12 am) and being in Southern Idaho we have an excellent chance of viewing its decent. So, if your up and you have your camera in hand grab some shots. I will do my best in capturing the event and share it all with you that morning. Location and Maximum Elevation map
Science Daily says: Comet Dust Brought Back To Earth: Paving The Way For Rosetta
"Mark Frauenfelder: Gareth Branwyn reports in Street Tech: 'You likely already know about Seti@Home and Folding@Home, but did you know that you'll soon have the opportunity to rummage through intersellar dirt at home, thanks to UC Berkeley's Stardust@Home project?
'When the Stardust spacecraft returns to Earth later this week (Sunday), its dust-bag will be filled with what it vaccumed out of the tail of comet Wild 2. While bringing this material back home is exciting enough, the spacecraft will also have a few grains of interstellar dust in its hoppers. And that's where Stardust@Home comes in. Scientists only expect to find 45 or so grains of such dust in the craft's collectors, creating a needle in a haystack scenario. So they decided to use the distributed eyeballs of the Internet to help speed the search. They've created a Virtual Microscope which will allow volunteer researchers to digitally scan the aerogel tiles where the submicroscopic grains have been trapped. Scientists hope that by finding and studying this interstellar dust, they can learn more about the internal processes of the supernova, flaring red giants, and neutron stars that would likely produce such dust.'link
[link, BoingBoing]:
UPDATED
"Xeni Jardin: NASA Stardust mission on final approach for landing
John Parres says,[link]:
Stardust is completing a 2.88 billion mile round-trip odyssey to capture and return cometary and interstellar dust particles to Earth in two days (2:12AM PST).
Sunday) The spacecraft performs its last maneuver on Friday, Jan. 13, at 8:53 p.m. Pacific time (9:53 p.m. Mountain time) to put it on the correct path to enter Earth's atmosphere. The speed of the sample return capsule as it enters Earth's atmosphere at 46,440 kilometers per hour (28,860 miles per hour) will be the greatest of any human-made object on record. The previous record was set in May 1969 by the returning Apollo 10 command module. Cool stuff. I will definately be tuning into NASA TV! Link to mission, Link to animations.
