A NASA spacecraft has zoomed past an asteroid in deep space in a final test of the instruments it will use to capture dust from the tail of a comet in 2004.
NASA鈥檚 Stardust probe flew to within 3300 kilometres of comet Annefrank at 0450 GMT on Saturday, travelling at a relative speed of seven kilometres per second. The fly-by was used to test the spacecraft鈥檚 comet-tracking system, its communications links and on-board dust capturing instruments.
Stardust will perform its main task in January 2004 when it will fly to within 100 kilometres of comet Wild 2. It will attempt to capture dust from this comet鈥檚 tail and should then return to Earth with the first ever comet samples in 2006.
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The samples should provide significant information on how the solar system evolved and how the planets formed. It is also hoped that when Stardust reaches Wild 2 it will capture the best ever images of a comet.
Light and bubbly
Radio signals received via NASA鈥檚 Deep Space Network 30 minutes after Saturday鈥檚 fly-by confirm that the spacecraft successfully activated its instruments and tracked Annefrank.
NASA hopes to receive low-resolution images of the four kilometre-wide asteroid in the next few days.
During the test, the spacecraft鈥檚 dust capturing instrument was activated. This uses an ultra-light, bubbly material called aerogel to capture and store dust particles. A dust counter and a dust mass spectrometer were also switched on. But it is very unlikely that any dust was collected, because of the probe鈥檚 considerable distance from the asteroid.
Asteroid 5535 Annefrank was first spotted in 1942 by the German asteroid hunter Karl Reinmuth. It later received its name in honour of the Jewish teenager Anne Frank whose famous diaries record life under Nazi occupation in wartime Amsterdam.