A Long Trek Home Where is Stardust now?

Click image for high-resolution version A short-exposure image of the nucleus of comet Wild 2, taken by Stardust on Jan. 2, shows tremendous surface detail. A long-exposure image taken just 10 seconds later showing jets was laid over the first to produce this image. (Jet Propulsion Laboratory)

On Jan. 2, Stardust came within 150 miles of the core of the comet Wild 2, gathering a variety of scientific readings and sending closeup pictures back to Earth. It is scheduled to return to Earth with its treasure, bits of comet dust, in January 2006. It is the first U.S. sample-return mission since Apollo 17 and the first ever designed to return material from outside the orbit of the moon.

Click on links below for the latest information, print-quality images and audio clips.

Stardust is a collaboration of the University of Washington, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology, NASA and Lockheed Martin Astronautics. Other key members of the team are The Boeing Co., the Max-Planck Institute, the NASA Ames Research Center and the University of Chicago.