Precious bits of space to land in Utah

For seven years, a NASA probe has cruised the silent depths of space, collecting interstellar dust particles and bits of material blown off by a comet. On Jan. 15 it will land in western Utah.

After a tour of 2.9 billion miles round-trip, the Stardust capsule will come down on the Utah Test and Training Range.

Stardust's sister ship was the unfortunate Genesis capsule that carried samples of the solar wind back to Utah in September 2004. Because a gravity-sensitive switch was installed wrong, the parachute that was supposed to let it to glide toward land never deployed.

Instead of a helicopter snatching the capsule, with its delicate cargo, in midair, the probe slammed into the mud of Dugway Proving Ground, which connected with the training range. Atmospheric friction had slowed Genesis from 25,000 miles per hour to 193 mph, but the impact was hard enough to shatter many of its glass collection plates.

Worse, mud forced inside the broken capsule, compromising what researchers had hoped would be pristine samples. Still, scientists said they were able to extract data from the $264 million project.

For Stardust, no midair catch is planned. Instead, a parachute is supposed to bring it to the surface. But NASA doesn't sound certain Stardust's sensor is going to work, either.

"While expecting a soft landing we are prepared for a hard landing knowing that, even under this condition, we expect to recover the cometary samples for mission success," said Thomas Duxbury, Stardust project manager, quoted in a Jet Propulsion Laboratory press release.

"We now eagerly await the delivery of our return capsule to the Utah Test and Training Range to see if it were sent via normal or express mail."

To ensure the safety of military personnel and the public, Stardust is coming down on the test range, which is on Dugway Proving Ground. Project managers have mapped a large elliptical landing footprint, and helicopters will retrieve the capsule soon after its landing.

According to JPL, Stardust has been in the works since the early 1980s, when Donald Brownlee of the University of Washington and Peter Tsou of JPL began working on the project. Contracts to build the probe were awarded in 1994. Stardust was launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla., on Feb. 7, 1999.

Between February and May 2000, it gathered dust particles in space, material that may have come from beyond our solar system. It swept past Earth in a gravity assist maneuver in January 2001, and from August through December 2002 it gathered more interstellar dust.