Capsule return like precision clockwork

Earlier reviews had convinced the experts that the anomaly that damaged Genesis would not happen with this spacecraft. "But nevertheless, you're coming in the atmosphere at extremely high speed and a lot of things have to happen, and so we could have had a problem coming in. But we didn't," he said.

"This thing went like clockwork," agreed Tom Duxbury, Stardust project manager for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

Joe Vellinga, deputy recovery operations manager for Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, said the team is very pleased to have it here.

"We're on the one-yard line," he said. Touchdown will happen when the sample container that was in the capsule is flown to Johnston Space Center in Houston and the engineers get the material. Wind blew the capsule a few miles from the center of the target, but it was still within the zone where NASA wanted it to land, at Dugway Proving Ground. Five marks were left on the ground when it tumbled.

Brownlee said Comet Wild 2 formed at the edge of the solar system. After billions of years in deep freeze, this primordial material is coming to Earth for study. He said the comet amounts to a library of information.

"Our planet and even ourselves have a direct relation" to such particles, Brownlee said. He predicted future textbooks would have a lot to say about the information brought back by Stardust.

---

E-mail: bau@desnews.com