archive: SETI [ASTRO] UW Astronomy Professor's Stardust Quest Set For Launch

SETI [ASTRO] UW Astronomy Professor's Stardust Quest Set For Launch

Larry Klaes ( lklaes@bbn.com )
Thu, 04 Feb 1999 15:00:39 -0500

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>Date: Tue, 2 Feb 1999 19:23:56 GMT
>From: Ron Baalke <BAALKE@kelvin.jpl.nasa.gov>
>To: astro@lists.mindspring.com
>Subject: [ASTRO] UW Astronomy Professor's Stardust Quest Set For Launch On
Feb 6
>Sender: owner-astro@brickbat12.mindspring.com
>Reply-To: Ron Baalke <BAALKE@kelvin.jpl.nasa.gov>
>
>University of Washington
>
>FROM: Vince Stricherz
>206-543-2580
>vinces@u.washington.edu
>
>FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Feb. 1, 1999
>
>UW astronomy professor's Stardust quest set for launch Saturday
>
>It's a moment University of Washington astronomy professor Donald Brownlee
>has been awaiting for nearly two decades. If all goes as planned, that
>moment will arrive Saturday afternoon when a Boeing Delta II rocket, with
>"University of Washington" emblazoned on the side, sends a desk-sized
>spacecraft on a seven-year journey to rendezvous with a comet.
>
>Stardust is scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral, Fla., at 1:07 p.m. PST,
>and UWTV will provide live coverage. The mission, selected in 1995 by NASA
>as part of its Discovery series, aims to capture particles from comet Wild 2
>(pronounced Vilt 2) and return them to Earth for analysis in laboratories at
>the UW, NASA and around the world. There's much to be learned, Brownlee
>said.
>
>"People have long suspected that comets played a role in the origin of life.
>No one really knows this because no one knows how life began. But we do know
>that comets are the most carbon-rich materials in the solar system, and we
>know they're full of organic compounds and they fall on the Earth all the
>time. Even now we have tens of thousands of tons of comet particles landing
>on the Earth every year," he said.
>
>Even though microscopic comet particles blanket open spaces such as parks
>and football stadiums every year, those particles don't tell the same story
>as ones collected from a comet such as Wild 2, Brownlee said. That's because
>Wild 2 only recently started orbiting close enough to the sun to make the
>mission feasible, so there hasn't been time enough for the sun's heat to
>destroy the characteristics of particles that have been preserved in a
>cryogenic deep freeze of space for billions of year.
>
>In 1980, Brownlee and NASA first considered a mission to capture comet
>particles. In that case, the target would have been Halley's comet, but the
>idea proved unworkable. Various technological advances and a bit of
>celestial luck changed that. Before 1974, Wild 2 traveled outside the orbit
>of Jupiter. But a close encounter with Jupiter that year altered the comet's
>trajectory, bringing it close enough to make Stardust possible. The
>spacecraft's encounter with the comet in early 2004 will take place just
>outside the orbit of Mars, 242 million miles from Earth on the other side of
>the sun.
>
>The mission is the first since Apollo 17 in 1972 to return extraterrestrial
>samples to Earth, and it is the first to bring back samples from beyond the
>orbit of the moon. Scientists will study the returned comet particles in the
>hope of understanding how life evolved on Earth. The planet probably was
>formed without water and without carbon or nitrogen, the building blocks of
>life. "The building blocks of life have long been thought to have come from
>further out in the solar system, out further away from the sun, and these
>would be materials from asteroids and comets," Brownlee said.
>
>Stardust will have journeyed 3.1 billion miles before it parachutes into the
>Utah desert in early 2006. During its encounter with Wild 2, a
>tennis-racquet shaped collector, sheathed with a wispy substance called
>aerogel, will be extended to collect comet grains when the spacecraft is
>within 100 miles of the comet's icy core. A high-power antenna will transmit
>close-up pictures, and sensitive equipment will gather data about the comet.
>
>The mission is a collaboration of the UW, NASA, NASA's Jet Propulsion
>Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif.,
>and Lockheed Martin Astronautics in Denver. Other key members of the team
>are The Boeing Co., Germany's Max-Planck-Institut f=FCr extraterrestrische
>Physik, the NASA Ames Research Center and the University of Chicago.
>
>Brownlee expects information gathered by Stardust to shed light on how the
>solar system and the universe evolved. The mission also could have
>implications on astrobiology, the search for life beyond Earth. The UW this
>fall will begin the first doctoral program in astrobiology to train people
>to look for life on other celestial bodies, such as Mars and Europa, a moon
>of Jupiter.
>
>"From the astrobiology standpoint, we're interested in what kind of organic
>materials actually exist and how much there is and whether this played a
>role (in the formation of life)," Brownlee said. "Now this may be an
>impossible problem. We can study astrobiology and we can investigate how
>life might have formed, but no one was there taking notes when life formed.
>
>"You have things ... before there was life and things after there was life
>but the real records aren't there," he said. "But by insight on this, you
>can at least look at what the starting materials were. So that's what
>Stardust is going to do, look at the starting materials, what was around in
>the solar system before life existed on Earth."
>
>The name "Stardust" seemed appropriate because of the nature of the project
>and the fact that people can relate to that name, Brownlee said. A recent
>radio interview ended with a few bars of the song "Woodstock" by Joni
>Mitchell, which includes the lyrics: "We are stardust, we are golden, we are
>2 billion-year-old carbon." That's an appropriate thought, Brownlee said.
>
>"Comets are a vehicle that brings organic materials to the Earth. Many of
>the carbon atoms in our bodies were in comets early in the history of the
>solar system. So one of the bylines of the Stardust mission is that we are
>stardust. Our bodies are actually made of stardust."
>
>Science aside, there's a hint of romanticism about this mission. That's why,
>come Saturday, it won't be "Woodstock" but instead the soft strains of Hoagy
>Carmichael's "Stardust" drifting through the launch area.
>
>###
>
>Additional information is available at http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov or at
>http://www.washington.edu/newsroom/stardust/stardust.html
>
>