A 29,000 mph sprint will be the final leg of a 2.88 billion mile round-trip journey for NASA’s Stardust mission, if all goes according to plan between now and Sunday’s pre-dawn landing near Salt Lake City. And, if the weather cooperates and all goes as planned here in Tuscaloosa, University of Alabama astronomers hope to capture and provide an early glimpse of the returning mission Saturday evening.
Sometime between 7 and 9 p.m. Saturday, Dr. William “Bill” Keel, professor of astronomy, and some of the students in Keel’s “Observational Techniques” class hope to locate and photograph the Stardust spacecraft through a UA telescope. If successful, the UA astronomers will post the black and white animated GIF images at http://www.astr.ua.edu/keel/stardust.
Close to midnight Saturday, the NASA spacecraft is scheduled to release a capsule containing previously captured comet dust. It’s scheduled to land some four hours later at the U.S. Air Force Utah Test and Training Range. By later analyzing the capsule’s comet samples – most of which are expected to be no more than a third of a millimeter across – NASA scientists say they hope to learn more about comets and the origin of the solar system. A successful mission would be the first time ever samples from a comet were brought back to earth.
For more information on the mission see http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.html.
Keel and the students plan to use UA’s new 16-inch reflector telescope housed in the Gallalee Hall observatory (see http://www.astr.ua.edu/keel/ua16inch.html for more information). The University’s astronomy program, in the department of physics and astronomy, is part of UA’s College of Arts and Sciences.