Comet encounter on February 15 successful!
On January 15, 2006, the Stardust spacecraft completed one history-making mission and began another. Returning from a rendezvous with Comet Wild 2, the spacecraft approached Earth and jettisoned the capsule containing particles collected directly from the comet, as well as interstellar dust medium. The capsule landed safely and on-target southwest of Salt Lake City, Utah, completing the world's first sample return from a comet.
Now this spacecraft is on a new record-setting mission: On February 15, 2011, at 04:40 UTC it had its closest encounter with Comet Tempel 1. Comet Tempel 1 was the comet previously targeted by the Deep Impact mission, making Stardust-NExT the first-ever follow-up mission to a comet. For details see the Stardust-NExT home page.
The mass spectrometer CIDA, built by part of the COSIMA team, made in-situ measurements of about 40 cometary dust particles during the fly-by. Details about the CIDA instrument can be found on FMI's space home page.
Welcome to the Rosetta COSIMA Homepage
Here grows the future homepage of the COSIMA project, bringing you all the news - and background information - about this instrument aboard the Rosetta spacecraft enroute to comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko, plus news about other comets, related missons and cosmic dust in a wider context.
Webmaster: Walter Schmidt (at) fmi.fi
Lead editor (for the time being): Daniel Fischer, dfischer (at) astro.uni-bonn.de
