In 2004 a NASA probe caught a comet’s tail on a sheet of aerogel, flew the grains 4.6 billion kilometres home, and dropped them into the Utah desert — the first solid pieces of a comet ever returned to Earth

Source Summary

On 2 January 2004, NASA’s Stardust spacecraft flew through the cloud surrounding comet 81P/Wild 2 at 6.1 kilometres per second. A collector filled with silica aerogel faced the incoming dust, slowing microscopic particles that would otherwise have struck like tiny hypervelocity projectiles. Two years later, a capsule carrying those grains entered Earth’s atmosphere and landed [...] The post In 2004 a NASA probe caught a comet’s tail on a sheet of aerogel, flew the grains 4.6 billion kilometres home, and dropped them into the Utah desert — the first solid pieces of a comet ever returned to Earth appeared first on Space Daily .