Stardust's mission finally has come to a close

You have all heard about the space craft Stardust and how it got samples from a comet. Well today those samples successfully landed on Earth. My dad was board and turned to the NASA channel today and saw a replay of the control room when they heard that Stardust had landed safely. He told me about it later and I thought I would find the story and post it on this blog.
They planned the mission for ten years and the mission lasted seven years (to think that they had predicted the comet's location nearly seventeen years before the comet was actually there, wow). It must have felt great to see that all that work wasn't for nothing. Stardust traveled 2.88 billion miles in the seven years in space (I wonder how it was powered, or was it powered at all, did they just power it to get it out there and then leave it to drift off in the right direction then power it again to get back home?). Stardust brought back comet and interstellar dust particles. Scientists will be analyzing and examining these particles for many years to come.

My dad and I were talking about this earlier today and I was thinking what if you helped plan Stardust's mission, and while it was in space you retired; now Stardust has landed and you get to watch new young scientists analyze the data that you had helped collect, and you just get to watch (now that would stink!).

Also can you imagine if while transferring the samples something happened and they got lost? You know how much money, time, and work went into getting those samples? There would be some really mad scientists out there if that happened.

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