Stardust returns safely to earth

Stardust launch, 1999 It was May 1998 when I read about this cool NASA endevour called Project Stardust. The idea of this mission was to launch a capsule that would fly through the tail of the Comet P/Wild 2 and collect some interstellar dust. The collected dust would then return to earth in a capsule so it could be studied here. Now, what was special about the mission is the fact that in a public outreach effort, over 1 million names of people were collected and placed on two chips inside the Stardust spacecraft: the first one has 136,000 names […]