With 198 days before its historic rendezvous with a comet, the Stardust spacecraft successfully completed the mission's third deep space maneuver. This critical maneuver modified the spacecraft's trajectory, placing it on a path to encounter and collect dust samples from comet Wild 2 in January 2004.

Artist concept of the Stardust spacecraft.

At 2100 Universal Time (2:00 p.m. Pacific Time), on June 18, Stardust fired its eight one-pound thrusters for 1456 seconds, changing its speed by 34.4 meters per second (about 77 miles per hour). This burn, the second in two days, completed the almost seven-year-long mission's third deep space maneuver.

Stardust has traveled over 2.9 billion kilometers (1.8 billion miles) since its February 7, 1999 launch. At present, it is hurtling through the cosmos at 124,300 kilometers per hour (77,200 miles per hour). In January 2004, Stardust will fly through the halo of dust that surrounds the nucleus of comet Wild 2. The spacecraft will return to Earth in January 2006 to make a soft landing at the U.S. Air Force Utah Test and Training Range. Its sample return capsule, holding microscopic particles of comet and interstellar dust, will be taken to the planetary material curatorial facility at NASA's Johnson Space Center, Houston, Texas, where the samples will be carefully stored and examined.

Stardust's cometary and interstellar dust samples will help provide answers to fundamental questions about the origins of the solar system.

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