Stardust mission goals

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 8 IPAVild 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. 

Among the goals for the Stardust mission was identifying the origin of the crystalline silicates in comets, whose presence in comets had been known from observations of comets Halley and Hale-Bopp (as reviewed in Bockelee-Morvan... 

Finally, let us recall the attempts to measure the 244Pu content in the local ISM, which may have some interesting astrophysical implications. At present, this can be done through the analysis of dust grains of identified interstellar origin recovered in deep-sea sediments (e.g. [52]). In a near future, the determination of elemental and isotopic composition of the ISM grains will be a major goal of research with their recovery to Earth by the Stardust mission [53],... 

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