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| NASA's Stardust spacecraft successfully released its capsule carrying cometary and interstellar dust. | LOS ANGELES, Jan.
14 (Xinhuanet)-- NASA's Stardust spacecraft successfully released its capsule
carrying cometary and interstellar dust, a mission expert said.
The separation process was completed at 21:56 Pacific
time (0556 GMT Sunday) when umbilical cables between spacecraft and capsule were
severed, according to Peter Tsou, the deputy investigator who put forward the
mission first in year 1981.
"Now we can confirm that the spacecraft and the
capsule have separated. There are two flying objects," Tsou told Xinhua in a
telephone interview.
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| Scientists are making sure that the Stardust have conducted the testing trials. | Fifteen minutes later, the "mother ship," the
Stardust spacecraft, will perform a maneuver to enter orbit around the sun,
while the capsule is set to enter Earth's atmosphere at an altitude of 125
kilometers over northern California, Tsou said.
The Stardust spacecraft has been hovering 111,020 km
up before releasing the shuttlecock-shaped capsule and putting it on course for
a re-entry early Sunday.
The capsule will spin in free fall until it enters
the atmosphere. Its returning speed at about 46,660 km per hour will be the
fastest re-entry of any man-made probe.
The mission, managed by NASA's Jet propulsion
laboratory, cost a total of 212 million U.S. dollars. Enditem |
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