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Loading contentNASA's sample-return mission that captured dust from the coma of comet Wild 2 and returned it to Earth in 2006, and later flew past Tempel 1 as Stardust-NExT.
space_mission:stardustDataset membership
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Scientific entity. See the evidence framework and authority dashboard.
How Stardust connects across Asteria Star — scientific, cultural, and astrological links are kept separate.
Periodic comet — 9P/Tempel.
Periodic comet — 81P/Wild.
A spacecraft that passes a small body once at high speed, gathering images and data during a brief encounter. Flybys are the cheapest way to reach a new target — Giotto at Halley, Deep Space 1 at Borrelly, Lucy at the Trojans.
A mission that collects material from a small body and brings it back to Earth for laboratory study — Hayabusa (Itokawa), Hayabusa2 (Ryugu), OSIRIS-REx (Bennu), and Stardust (comet Wild 2).
A highly reliable medium-lift workhorse that launched GPS satellites and many NASA planetary missions, including the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity and the Kepler telescope.
The Jet Propulsion Laboratory is a NASA federally funded research and development center in California that builds and operates robotic spacecraft.
Thousands of cometary dust particles captured in aerogel as Stardust flew through the coma of comet 81P/Wild 2, returned in 2006 — the first cometary material and the first sample from beyond the Moon. The grains revealed high-temperature minerals and the amino acid glycine.
The capsule that returned Stardust's aerogel trays of comet Wild 2 dust — the first sample-return capsule to bring material back from beyond the Moon.
For sample-return missions, the journey home and the high-speed atmospheric reentry of the capsule to a recovery site — the phase that delivers the science to Earth.
A project in which volunteers scanned microscope images of the aerogel flown on NASA's Stardust mission, hunting for the microscopic tracks of interstellar dust grains — a needle-in-a-haystack search that distributed human attention could solve.
A NASA mission at the Sun–Earth L1 point that measures the solar wind and energetic particles upstream of Earth, giving roughly an hour of warning before disturbances reach the planet.
ESA's Asteroid Impact Mission — the original European orbiter half of the AIDA collaboration, meant to observe the DART impact in real time. It was not funded in 2016, but its science was largely revived and reshaped as the Hera mission.
Apollo 11 was the NASA mission that in July 1969 first landed humans on the Moon, with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walking on the lunar surface.
Apollo 13's planned lunar landing was aborted after an oxygen-tank explosion; the crew returned safely in a celebrated rescue.
Apollo 17 was the final crewed Apollo lunar landing, carrying the first scientist-astronaut to the Moon.
Apollo 8 was the first crewed mission to leave Earth orbit and orbit the Moon, returning the famous 'Earthrise' photograph.
Facts on this topic will be cited from these primary and reference sources.
Mission data, planetary science, space telescopes, and public-domain imagery.
Most NASA-produced imagery is in the public domain; individual items are checked for usage terms before publication.