Stardust - Wild 2 encounter only a few weeks away now...

[JackHiggins]

Forty-nine days before its historic rendezvous with a comet, NASA's Stardust spacecraft successfully photographed its quarry, comet Wild 2 (pronounced Vilt-2), from 25 million kilometers (15.5 million miles) away.

Details:
http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/

and the first picture:
http://www.space.com/php/multimedia/ima ... img_02.jpg

Although I don't think i'll get to see the simulation in Celestia as it happens- i'll be skiing in Italy at the time...

[lostfisherman]

I was unaware of the Stardust mission, I'll keep an eye out for news.

Skiing? Imagine yourself on a big dirty snowball...

[Evil Dr Ganymede]

Would I be alone in being totally, utterly unexcited by a picture of a dot a few pixels across??

Though it is neat that they can even see a dot from so many millions of km away, if they're aiming to actually impress people with a 'first picture' they could at least wait til they're a lot closer so some kind of detail can be resolved. I doubt this sort of picture is blowing the socks off your average layman.

[JackHiggins]

Would I be alone in being totally, utterly unexcited by a picture of a dot a few pixels across??

Well, I don't think they released it to really excite people- I just found it as a small story on space.com... They have to take pictures to make sure the trajectory & alignment are ok- so why not release the first one where you can actually see the target?

Anyway, they're not going to see any kind of detail of the nucleus until a couple of days before the flyby...

[Evil Dr Ganymede]

Well, I don't think they released it to really excite people- I just found it as a small story on space.com... They have to take pictures to make sure the trajectory & alignment are ok- so why not release the first one where you can actually see the target?

I guess you have a point there. That said they do announce these things as press releases, which implies a certain degree of "look at how cool we are!" about it

[chris]

Would I be alone in being totally, utterly unexcited by a picture of a dot a few pixels across??

It's not a very interesting image visually, but I do enjoy some pre-mission buildup. And given all the attention that Mars Express and the Spirit and Opportunity rovers are receiving, I can certainly see where the Stardust team may have been looking for an excuse to make a press release, so that own mission isn't overlooked. The next few weeks are going to be exciting.

Personally, the mission that I'm really looking forward to is Cassini. This is in part because of my involvement with Celestia--the current Mars missions won't produce any new data for Celestia, but Cassini will give us a whole new set of textures for the Saturnian system

--Chris

[jamarsa]

I guess you have a point there.

Yes, exactly that, although a bit magnified...

Sorry, I couldn't resist...

[JackHiggins]