NASA Stardust canister opens to reveal "wonderful samples"

At Johnson Space Center in Houston today, NASA astrophysicist Scott Sandford reports that a team of scientists, "opened the (Stardust) canister and exposed the aerogel tray (containing comet dust and interstellar particles) for the first time."

Following is an excerpt of the email Dr. Sanford sent to NASA colleagues -- and several Boing Boing readers have pointed out that the NASA photo above is TOTALLY a ripoff of Apple's ripoff of the Postal Service video. Sheesh.

Yesterday was a very long day. I was up at 4:30 a.m. MST to go down to the Avery complex in preparation for flying down to JSC. We loaded up all the Sample Return Capsule (SRC) gear and related hardware onto a flatbed truck and transported it to a waiting C-130 Hercules provided courtesy of the Wyoming National Guard.

Loading the plane was cold work (colder than the recovery, so of course my nice, warm recovery parka was stowed in the gear). The Herc flight was similar to my experiences with Herc in Antarctica, noisy with alternating hot and cold locations. Seating was the typical hammock webbing. The sample canister remained on N2 purge during the flight, just as it has been since it entered the Utah Test and Training Range (UTTR) clean room.

The flight got very bumpy for the last half hour, and apparently the landing looked a little hairy from the ground, but it seemed like pretty smooth touchdown from my perspective. A convoy of police cars, vans and a truck were waiting to take us to JSC. It took almost an hour to transfer from the plane to the truck (we were very careful and thorough). We got a police escort all the way to JSC; police cars took turns dashing ahead of us so they could block all the intersections, so we never had to stop at lights. If we'd added a brass band it would have made a lovely parade!

We arrived at the Curatorial building at JSC, and there was a nice little crowd of people there to greet us and give enthusiastic applause (one of the only times in all of this that I got a little choked up). The SRC components were all loaded into the Space Exposed Hardware (SEH) clean room, and then I escorted the canister up to the Stardust clean room. There the Lockheed team opened the canister and exposed the aerogel tray for the first time. Every aerogel tile is still in place!!! By and large the tiles are in amazingly good shape.

The Science Team entered the clean room at this point, and we safely transferred the sample tray to its holding fixture in the clean room. This was a nerve-wracking step but was completed with only a few tiny pieces of loose aerogel falling from the tray (into waiting clean trays.)

It immediately became obvious that we have lots of wonderful samples.

There are many impacts that are EASILY visible to the naked eye! In some cases you can even see the particles. Presumably, we have even more, smaller 10-20 micron grains in the aerogel. It looks like we have succeeded well beyond our wildest hopes! I am not sure if it is good clean room protocol to hug each other, but there was a lot of it going on for the first ten minutes or so. We then got organized and began systematically photographing the cometary tiles. I helped with this until about 6:30 p.m. CST when my many days of irregular sleep and meals started to tell, when I turned my job over to Andrew Westphal. After I left, the rest of the team got the cometary and interstellar trays separated and safely stored away. I had dinner with a few members of the Science Team, checked into my hotel, and made the mistake of laying down 'for a minute'. I woke up the next morning at 7:30 a.m. CST.

Today, we spent the morning cleaning up a number of small pieces of aerogel that were left on the canister base plate. A number of beautiful particles were found just in these little pieces. In fact, I suspect that many of the lovely pictures that we will show at tomorrow's press conference will come solely from these 'scraps.'

After the loose aerogel was cleaned up, the Lockheed folks went back into the clean room, removed a number of scientifically important contamination 'coupons'' on the canister and removed the tray arm. All the canister hardware was then moved back to the SEH. We are now scanning a few of the cometary cells at high resolution. There seem to be a variety of track types (carrot, stylus, hedgehog, ..), and we want to get a measure of the types and abundances before we decide which cells to remove initially.

Okay, that's the news for now. By tomorrow we'll have a better sense of what we have, but there is no doubt that we have some great scientific work to ahead of us!

Here are pictures, here is background on the DC-8 Stardust Observation Mission, and here's more about Aerogel. Here is Dr. Sandford's bio page.

Image (courtesy of NASA): Donald Brownlee, Stardust principal investigator with the University of Washington, flashes a victory sign for the successful arrival of Stardust material. Also pictured are JSC's Mike Zolensky (left), curator and co-investigator for the project; Friedrich Horz, JSC, and Peter Tsou, Jet Propulsion Laboratory.