Waterton Canyon – A Colorado-built spacecraft screamed through the dark sky over Utah at 3 a.m Sunday, creating a brilliant orange streak across Nevada and landing much as planned, drifting on a parachute into the Utah desert at 3:10 a.m.
For nearly four harrowing minutes, however, scientists could not detect one of two chutes that were to stabilize and slow the Stardust landing capsule, which carried clues to the solar system’s birth. The 101-pound capsule appeared to plummet about 60,000 feet more than expected before slowing from its speed of nearly 30,000 mph.
It was a nail-biting finish to a 2.88 billion-mile journey.
“Oh, no. It’s coming in way too fast,” Jim Neuman, Lockheed’s mission support manager, said at about 3 a.m.
His colleagues stared at NASA television or their computer screens and dropped their heads into their hands.
“The stuff we put ourselves through,” said one mission-control expert at Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Waterton Canyon, shaking his head after the Stardust mission’s landing capsule finally slowed.
Sixteen months ago in the same mission-control room, Lockheed engineers watched the Genesis lander, a Lockheed-built cousin to Stardust, crash into the Utah desert at nearly 200 mph after two parachutes failed to deploy.
Researchers are still working to extract data from Genesis’ smashed collectors, which carried fragments of solar wind.
“We’re noting deceleration,” a NASA announcer finally reported at 3:04 Sunday, and the room exploded into cheers.
“That was heart-rending,” said Allan Cheuvront, Lockheed’s deputy program manager for Stardust.
Stardust’s landing capsule carried dust collected from Comet Wild 2 – the most distant material ever captured in space and brought back to Earth.
Scientists hope the dust will help them understand the origin of the solar system and perhaps even life on Earth.
Comets smashing into early Earth likely provided much of the water and organic chemicals essential for life here, researchers believe.
Space experts were watching the $212 million Stardust mission carefully, not only because Genesis crash-landed. Maryland- based Lockheed Martin Corp. leads one of two teams competing to develop the successor to NASA’s space shuttle, a deal that could be worth more than $2 billion, said Pat McKenzie, a Lockheed manager.
“The success of this mission (Stardust) is not critical for that evaluation team,” McKenzie said. “However, success in something like this that … nobody else has done before, that boosts the company’s general credibility.”
The Stardust science capsule will be transported to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.
Staff writer Katy Human can be reached at 303-820-1910 or khuman@denverpost.com.
