The total weight of the spacecraft including the propellant needed for deep space maneuvers is 380 kilograms. The overall length of the main bus is roughly 5 feet (1.7 meters), about the size of an average office desk.

Mission Over View Stardust is the first U.S. space mission dedicated solely to the exploration of a comet, and the first robotic mission designed to return extraterrestrial material from outside the orbit of the Moon. The Stardust spacecraft was launched on February 7, The primary goal of Stardust is to collect dust and carbon-based samples during its closest encounter with Comet Wild 2 - pronounced "Vilt 2.“ Rendezvous was scheduled to take place in January 2004, after nearly four years of space travel. Additionally, the Stardust spacecraft will bring back samples of interstellar dust, including recently discovered dust streaming into our Solar System from the direction of Sagittarius. These materials are believed to consist of ancient pre-solar interstellar grains and nebular that include remnants from the formation of the Solar System. Analysis of such fascinating celestial specks is expected to yield important insights into the evolution of the Sun its planets and possibly even the origin of life itself.

Catching the Dust Stardust uses an extraordinary substance called aerogel. This is a silicon-based solid with a porous, sponge-like structure in which 99.8 percent of the volume is empty space. By comparison, aerogel is 1,000 times less dense than glass, which is another silicon-based solid. When a particle hits the aerogel, it buries itself in the material, creating a carrot-shaped track up to 200 times its own length. This slows it down and brings the sample to a relatively gradual stop. Since aerogel is mostly transparent - with a distinctive smoky blue cast - scientists will use these tracks to find the tiny particles.

Home On January 15, 2006, the Stardust spacecraft's sample return capsule parachuted gently onto the Utah desert. Before they can be studied, though, these tiny interstellar grains will have to be found. This will not be easy. Unlike the thousand of particles of varying sizes collected from the comet, scientists estimate that Stardust collected only around 45 interstellar dust particles. They are tiny-only about a micron (a millionth of a meter) in size! These miniscule particles are embedded in an aerogel collector 1,000 square centimeters in size. If we were doing this project twenty years ago, we would have searched for the tracks through a high-magnification microscope. Due to scope size, we would have to move the microscope more than 1.6 million times to search the whole collector. In each field of view, you would focus up and down by hand to look for the tracks. Even starting twenty years ago, we would still be doing it today!

Home By asking for volunteer help, the project can be performed in months instead of years. To find the particles, the project will use an automated scanning microscope to automatically collect images of the entire Stardust interstellar collector at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. The stacks of images are called focus movies. All in all there will be nearly a million such focus movies. These are available to users Volunteers can view them with the aid of a special Virtual Microscope (VM) that works in your web browser. Lets visit the site…..