"It was a huge success," said Brownlee, the mission's chief scientist.

"Everything worked just great. We got tremendous pictures, better than what we expected. When the spacecraft first came in, we were a little worried, since we couldn't distinguish the asteroid from the stars, but once we got closer, we could see it very clearly. It turned out that we were approaching the asteroid's night side, and since all asteroids are different shapes, you can't definitively say which side will be light and which side will be dark.

The pictures we got show that the Annefrank asteroid is a lot bigger and a lot darker than we originally expected. It's about [seven] kilometers in diameter, the same size as the asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs 64 million years ago."

While the Annefrank flyby excited scientists involved, this weekend's operation only constituted a dress rehearsal of sorts for the Stardust spacecraft's upcoming encounter with the comet Wild 2 (pronounced vild two).

On Jan. 2, 2004, the spacecraft will pass within 75 miles of this new comet, close enough to capture some of the gas and dust surrounding its nucleus.

Traveling at about 13,400 mph, the spacecraft will capture particles traveling many times the speed of sound.

"Basically, we got to see how all of Stardust's systems worked with this encounter," said Brownlee. "With the asteroid flyby, we passed a major milestone in the mission. After this, all Stardust has left to do is collect the samples from Wild 2 and return to Earth."

Planning for the Stardust began in 1995, and the program was approved and funded by NASA a year later, costing $200 million - a remarkably low price for a space mission. Its main goal is to gather samples of dust from outer space, hence its name. Wild 2 was chosen for sampling because it is the easiest and most economical comet to reach from Earth.

"Comets are like ancient records of the history of our solar system," Brownlee said. "Most of them are in orbits far beyond our reach, and Wild 2 has only been in its current orbit since 1974. Its orbit used to span between Jupiter's and Neptune's, but in 1974 it passed so near to Jupiter that the planet's gravity altered its course, and now it orbits between Jupiter and Mars."

The asteroid takes its name from Anne Frank, a Jewish teenager who recorded her experiences hiding from the Nazis in Amsterdam during World War II in a now-famous diary. It was discovered in 1942 by the German astronomer Karl Reinmuth, three months before the Frank family first went into hiding, but its current name was not given until long after the war ended.

Following its encounter with Wild 2, Stardust will return to Earth and deposit its samples in a self-return capsule that will parachute to the ground in Utah around Jan. 15, 2006. The Stardust project is the first sample-return space mission in the United States since the last Apollo moon landing in 1974.

"It's really exciting to have done this successfully," said Brownlee. "Doing things like this in space takes a lot of talented people working very hard.

There's a lot that can go wrong in space, so when everything works out like this, it's wonderful."

Stardust Mission and more pics
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