Chron.com | NASA craft's payload may offer a big payoff

Chron.com | NASA craft's payload may offer a big payoff: "Jan. 6, 2006, 10:44PM
NASA craft's payload may offer a big payoff
A long-awaited mission returning with cosmic dust that could explain our very origins

By MARK CARREAU
Copyright 2006 Houston Chronicle

After seven years of collection work in the inner solar system, a NASA spacecraft is hurtling back to Earth with a cargo of microscopic particles that may hold clues to the earliest formation of the planets and the distribution of materials responsible for life.

Aptly named Stardust, the unmanned craft is on course for a fiery plunge into the Earth's atmosphere early Jan. 15, descending in darkness by parachute to the Utah desert.

Eager scientists plan to pore over thousands of space particles, which were snatched by Stardust from the comet Wild-2 on Jan. 2, 2004, and from a stream of interstellar dust flowing through the solar system in 2000 and 2002."