Space capsule to carry tiny but important cargo

The space capsule will return with millions of tiny dust specks.
Knight Ridder Newspapers
SAN JOSE, Calif. -- If all goes well Sunday, a 100-pound space capsule called Stardust will come screaming into the atmosphere at nearly 29,000 mph, faster than any man-made object to date.
For a little more than a minute it will blaze as bright as Venus and become an artificial fireball whose sonic boom shakes the ground.
Then, deploying a series of parachutes, it will drift to a gentle landing in the Utah desert, cradling millions of pieces of dust that, if lumped together, would weigh less than a grain of salt.
It will be the first solid stuff brought back from space since the Apollo moon missions and the first to come from beyond the moon.
And if the mission succeeds, the impact could be huge.
Some of the grains were collected 242 million miles from Earth, from a comet called Wild 2 (named after its discoverer and pronounced "VILT 2"). Others are part of the dust that drifts between the stars.
Significance
Researchers expect to learn more from these specks than from all the moon rocks put together.
They include pristine particles left over from the formation of the solar system 4.6 billion years ago. They could shed light on how space rocks pummeling the young Earth might have contained some of the essential ingredients for life.
And the performance of the heat shield, which was developed and tested at NASA/Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., will help the space agency design protection for future craft -- including the Crew Exploration Vehicle, the successor to the space shuttle.
"The real exciting thing will be opening the canister and seeing what the comet delivered to us," said Don Brownlee, a planetary scientist at the University of Washington and one of the lead scientists for the Stardust mission, which cost $168 million -- not including the launch vehicle.
Scientists will watch the show from a NASA DC-8 research plane flying out of Moffett Field, from the vast empty spaces of Nevada and from the U.S. Utah Test & amp; Training Range, where controllers will try to bring the canister down somewhere in a 1,300-square-mile area.
And they're inviting more than 30,000 volunteers to help by registering as official observers or using a "virtual microscope" on their home computer to locate specks of dust embedded in a protective fluff of aerogel.