A little space capsule whose cargo of comet dust could help explain the origins of the solar system will be opened this week after a Newport Beach helicopter pilot found and retrieved the container while flying low and fast Sunday over the darkened salt flats of Utah.
Aided by a full moon, Cliff Fleming, 55, located the Stardust spacecraft’s sample return capsule at 2:40 a.m. using a powerful spotlight attached to his helicopter. The 32-inch capsule had parachuted onto the Utah Test and Training Range, southwest of Salt Lake City. It was tipped on its side, scorched but intact.
Fleming, who usually does stunt flying for Hollywood movie studios, found the capsule for NASA about 45 minutes after it shot through the atmosphere at 29,000 mph – faster than any man-made object has ever returned to Earth. The re-entry produced a brilliant streak seen in northern California, Utah, Nevada and Oregon.
“It’s been a perfect night,” Fleming told the Orange County Register at 4:15 a.m. Sunday. “God gave us a gigantic light in the full moon and that helped us locate the capsule, which was in mushy dirt out there in the dark.”
Fleming also benefited from a lull in a storm, although strong winds blew the 100-pound capsule five miles off course. Its mother ship, Stardust, veered into orbit around the sun.
The capsule contains millions of particles that Stardust collected from Comet Wild 2 during a fly-by in January 2004. The primordial material, along with interstellar dust the probe also grabbed during its nearly 3 billion-mile journey, represents clues about how the solar system formed and evolved and, possibly, how life arose on Earth.
NASA plans to transport the capsule to Johnson Space Center in Houston on Tuesday, where researchers will carefully open the capsule and remove dust that was snared in a sticky, airy material called aerogel.
“This is not the finish line. This is just the intermediate pit stop,” Stardust mission manager Tom Duxbury said shortly after the capsule was wheeled into a clean room at Michael Army Airfield.
The recovery comes about 16 months after the Genesis spacecraft, which held samples of the solar wind, crashed in a nearby region of Utah. Fleming was supposed to have used a hook attached to his helicopter to snag Genesis’ parachute. But the chute never opened.
Stardust streaked into the atmosphere at 1:57 a.m. Sunday and its drogue and main parachutes opened flawlessly, minutes after the capsule produced a spectacular fireball.
“I could see it from the ground. (The capsule) was a big, red shiny ball that turned into a streak that looked like it was more than a mile long,” said Fleming, who has worked on such films as “Batman” and “Mission Impossible 3.”
The capsule touched down at 2:10 a.m. Controllers gave Fleming the container’s coordinates and he found the capsule’s large parachute at 2:30 p.m., using a 30 million candlepower light. The chute, as planned, separated from the probe on the ground. But minutes later, he spotted the scorched capsule nearby.
“The capsule apparently rolled over on its transmitter so that we couldn’t get a reading from its locator beacon,” Fleming said. “And our infrared system didn’t pick it up until we were almost there. It wasn’t as bright as we expected.”
Fleming dropped off a two-person crew, which inspected and packaged the capsule before loading it onto the helicopter for transport. The achievement drew giddy applause from controllers and an emotional response from Don Brownlee, the project’s principal investigator.
Describing the capsule’s fiery descent, Brownlee said during a news conference, “It looked like Mars. It kept getting brighter and brighter and brighter. … It’s ironic that you have a comet mission that produces a comet.”
Authorities worried that they wouldn’t be able to do a helicopter recovery. Snow was in the forecast. Flurries did fall for a while, but the skies soon cleared and the winds grew lighter, allowing Fleming to fly and land in the desert. The recovery team, bundled up for the 38-degree night air, secured the capsule as Fleming hovered 200 feet above in his helicopter, shining a Night Sun beam on them.
Fleming’s next job: Test dropping an experimental NASA payload from 8,000 feet later this month.
Contact the writer: Register science editor Gary Robbins can be reached at (714) 796-7970 or grobbins@ocregister.com. Read his daily science blog at blogs.ocregister.com/sciencedude.
