Comet 81P/Wild

Stardust February 7, 1999, saw the start of NASA s Stardust mission the cometary probe, the first mission to collect cosmic dust and return the sample to Earth, has a time-of-flight mass spectrometer (CIDA, Cometary and Interstellar Dust Analyser) on board. This analyses the ions which are formed when cosmic dust particles hit the instrument s surface. In June 2004, the probe reached its goal, the comet 81P/Wild 2, getting as close as 236 km The CIDA instrument, which was developed at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching (near Munich), studied both cometary dust and interstellar star dust. 

Brownlee D E, et al (2006) Comet 81P/Wild 2 under a micro-scope. Science 314 1711-1716 Westphal A J, Butterworth A L, Snead C J, Craig N, Anderson D, Jones S M, Brownlee D E, Farnsworth R, Zolensky M E (2005) Stardust at Home A massively distributed public search for interstellar dust in the Stardust interstellar dust collector. Lunar Planetary Sci. Con. XXXVI, Lunar Planetary Instime, Houston, TX Abstract 1908... 

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