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Stardust Raises its Shields

SpaceRef : "T-minus 48 hours and counting to a historic rendezvous, NASA's Stardust spacecraft has officially entered a comet's coma, the cloud of dust and gas surrounding the nucleus. Stardust is scheduled to hurtle past comet Wild 2 on January 2, 2004, at approximately 2:40 a.m. EST.

'Just like in Star Trek we have our shields up,' said Tom Duxbury, Stardust program manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Pasadena, Calif. 'The spacecraft has entered Wild 2's coma, which means at any time we could run into a cometary particle. At 6.1 kilometers per second (approximately 3.8 miles per second), this is no small event.'

To protect Stardust against the blast of expected particles and rocks as it travels approximately 300 kilometers (186 miles) from the Wild 2 nucleus, the spacecraft rotated, so it is flying in the shadow of its 'Whipple Shields'. The shields are named for American astronomer Dr. Fred L. Whipple. In the 1950s, he came up with the idea of shielding spacecraft from high-speed collisions with bits and pieces ejected from comets."

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