We Are Stardust

Mission personnel remove a canister, bottom section, containing comet dust as they dismantle the Stardust capsule in a clean room Sunday, Jan. 15, 2006, at Dugway Proving Ground, Utah. The seven-year project collected particles from a comet. (AP Photo/Douglas C. Pizac)

We Have Fallen
NASA's Stardust Mission has returned to Earth. After a seven year mission to collect comet debris, NASA are describing the return of the stardust probe as a victory.

The Stardust capsule survived a fiery plunge through the atmosphere early Sunday, parachuting to the Utah salt flats. It bounced three times in soft mud before coming to rest on its side.

The landing chipped off a piece of the capsule's heat shield, meant to protect it as it re-enters Earth. But the capsule and its canister were in otherwise good shape, said Joe Vellinga of Lockheed Martin, which built the capsule.

"Everything is very clean. It looks very pristine," Vellinga said Monday.

Stardust's homecoming with the first comet particles ever captured in space was a relief for NASA, whose Genesis space probe carrying solar wind particles crashed and split open in 2004 after its parachutes failed to open. Despite the accident, scientists were able to salvage some of the fragile solar samples for analysis.

Two years ago the other probe just went bung on the way down and that was that. It's also the first bit of space rock to be brought back to Earth since the last Apollo Mission to my knowledge.

Getting Back To The Garden
I'm just going to jot down some headline that I've been unable to write about here. Well, it's life, y'know, I got busy. :)

The Propsed probe to Pluto is about to be launched.

It will be the fastest spacecraft ever launched, zooming past the moon in nine hours and reaching Jupiter in just over a year at a speed nearly 100 times that of a jetliner.

Its target is Pluto - the solar system's last unexplored planet, 4.8 billion kilometres from Earth. And the New Horizons spacecraft, set for liftoff on Tuesday, could reach it within nine years.

One of the outcomes of the Space Shuttle scuttlebut and dealys has been that many of the scheduled payloads haave not made their way into orbit. For instance, this European space laboratory here.

The US shuttle is the only vehicle that can carry large equipment to the International Space Station and its grounding has left the European Space Agency wondering how else it might send the Columbus research centre into orbit.

"What we hope is for the Columbus to be launched as quickly as possible," Jean-Jacques Dordain, director general of the European Space Agency, told a news conference on Monday.

US space agency Nasa halted shuttle flights for more than two years after the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated over Texas in February 2003, killing seven astronauts.

It launched the Discovery shuttle last July but the fleet was quickly grounded again because of new problems.
The next shuttle flight is tentatively scheduled for May. But Dordain said there are other countries with scientific projects waiting to catch a ride.

"There are others in the queue, notably the Japanese who want their laboratory launched as quickly as possible," he said.

So that's been drag.

Here's an interesting story on doing EVA.

The heavy reliance on orbital hardhat crews to build the station has raised the stakes for each journey out of the hatch. Now "assembly" walks, which last 6 to 8 hours, are packed with chores, and an unfinished job could affect construction for years to come.

During his time in space, the dangers were secondary, says astronaut and four-time spacewalker Michael Foale. "I'm not anxious about my life. I'm anxious about the task."

There is so much work to do that spacewalkers, who always go outside in pairs, no longer tackle all their tasks together. Instead they split up and may not see each other for hours, "a lonely feeling ... especially at night," Tanner admits.

Adding to the crew's burden, the chill of space will ruin some cold-sensitive parts of the station if they are not quickly installed. So spacewalkers race the clock, knowing that a $500-million piece of equipment could be a pile of space junk if they dawdle.

"The mental stress shouldn't be underplayed," says consultant Leroy Chiao, who left the astronaut corps in December. "When you're out there doing the work, you can't help but feel the pressure."

It's tough up there.
Here's another on EVA, this time with a cosmonautical flavour:

In a country where vodka is consumed in industrial quantities, officials at Russia's medical space research establishment said the consumption of alcohol in space was not only a right but a positive advantage.

"Folks are flying in orbit for half a year or so," a spokesman said. "They do tons of work. Especially exhausting are space walks where they can lose several kilos in several hours. That's why, many of us think that it won't be that bad to have a little drink to replenish one's strength."

Russian cosmonauts and space officials welcomed the idea of lifting the ban, but cautioned that weightlessness multiplies the effect of alcohol.

Yuri Lanchakov, commander of the Cosmonaut Corps at the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre near Moscow, told the Sunday Telegraph: "Twenty grams of a good cognac [about one pub measure] would be good." He intends to issue a tot to anyone returning after a space walk, and to allow astronauts to drink alcohol to toast New Year.

Champagne, however, will remain prohibited because the pressure could turn bottles into small missiles if opened in the gravity-free atmosphere of the space station.

An official at Russia's Federal Space Agency (Roskosmos) said: "Not only could the recoil be unpredictable, but the bottle could explode even before you open it."

He welcomed the idea of allowing alcohol on the space station but said "everything should be in moderation" - perhaps remembering how in 1994 President Boris Yeltsin failed to emerge from his plane at Shannon Airport in Ireland after imbibing too much.

And that about wraps it up.