Many of these slides are self-descriptive and therefore have no narrative. For more information about the STARDUST mission and comets the URL for the mission homepage is http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/top.html.

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2. Early comet recordings by the Chinese and Arabs
3. Babylonian comet descriptions
4. Historic comet appeared before the Battle of Hastings in 1066
5. King Harold of England is told of the comet. Both Harold and Duke William of France thought the comet meant bad luck for the other one.
6. By 1600’s comets are plotted against background of constellations and tracked across the sky.
7. Details of comets are recorded – still thought of as omens of bad things to come.
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12. First novel about a trip to a comet – Jules Verne in 1878.
13. William Huggins had discovered cyanogens in the tail of the Great Comet of 1881, so when it was time for Comet Halley to return in 1910 in close proximity to Earth everyone was terrified. Comet pills, comet insurance, and gas masks were sold as people thought they would all die from the poisonous gases. However in 1910 the Chicago Ledger ran a more sedate story about a trip to a comet.
14. February 7^th, 1999 the STARDUST spacecraft is launched to rendezvous with a comet.
15. STARDUST was launched aboard a Delta II Rocket.
16. Onboard camera shows rocket boosters being jettisoned
17. STARDUST weighs 770 lbs – the size of a refrigerator. It has a computer chip onboard inscribed with all the names of the Vietnam soldiers that died during the Vietnam War.
18. Aerogel is a silica gel – the lightest known solid with a density of .05 g/cc – 1000 times less dense than glass. It has 39 times more insulating capacity than any other insulation materials – people are trying to figure out how to use Aerogel for windows, airplanes, computer chips (beer cooler?).
19. The aluminum grid filled with Aerogel is one square meter. One side will collect interstellar particles and the other side comet particles.
20. Aerogel can stop micro-sized particles traveling faster than a bullet from a rifle in one and a half centimeters without deforming the particles.
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22. STARDUST will rendezvous with Comet Wild-2 in 2004, capture particles from the comet, and return those particles to Earth in the Sample Return Capsule (SRC) in 2006.
23. Comet Wild-2 with a diameter of 2 km was chosen because it is fairly pristine in condition – only had 5 trips around the Sun. The spacecraft will encounter the comet 97.5 days past perihelion at a distance of 1.6 AU from Earth and travel through the come 150 km from the center of the nucleus.
24. Dr. Paul Wild discovered comet Wild-2 in 1978 while he was conducting a nova search.
25. The SRC will land at the Utah Testing and Training Range in the desert near Salt Lake City. The landing ellipse is 30 km by 84 km. The SRC will have a beacon that a helicopter will use to locate the capsule. The spacecraft itself will not return to Earth.
26. Comets have always fascinated us, whether we thought of them as evil or beautiful. They are part of our culture.
27. Good article about historic comets that were thought to be omens of change.
28. Even now that we know what comets are and where they come from many people still fear them or think of them as a supernatural phenomena. In the 1980’s before the eminent return of Comet Halley there were rumors that Halley was going to crash into the Earth’s north pole, corrupt the magnetic field lines and electrocute all life on the planet. In 1995 many people took their lives because they thought that a spacecraft following Comet Hale-Bopp was coming to transport them to another place.
29. Comets have caused major extinction events on Earth. They have significantly changed the course of evolution on this planet.
30. The great extinction that caused 75% of all life on this planet to become extinct was caused by a comet collision.
31. The crater from the great extinction is located in the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico. A Mexican geologist discovered it in 1950 but the significance of the crater was not recognized until 1991. The crater is 65 million years old, 200-300 km in diameter, and under 1100 meters of limestone.
32. The Earth has been hit by many comets/meteors.
33. A SOHO image from 1998 which shows two comets, which came too close to the Sun and will be destroyed as they enter the Sun’s atmosphere.
34. Craters are everywhere – (left to right, top to bottom) – Jupiter, Mercury, Moon, Mars, Venus.
35. Manicouagan Crater in Quebec is ~200,000 years old and heavily eroded.
36. Barringer Crater East of Flagstaff, AZ is ~50,000 years old and still has a sharp rim.
37. On June 30, 1908 an object exploded above Siberia with the force of 1000 Hiroshima bombs. In Western Europe newspapers could be read at night and in London the population thought the noise was a riot as there had been a soccer match that evening.
38. It took 19 years to reach the remote spot and a scene of total devastation with no crater and no pieces of the object was encountered.
39. Kulik in 1927 extracted particles from a tree and decided the object was a meteor. Galli in 1989 took resin samples and decided the particles were from the Taurid meteor shower or cometary in origin. Comet or meteor? The particles that will be brought back to Earth by STARDUST will hopefully answer this mystery.
40. The news that a meteor may have a close encounter with Earth brought forth movies from Hollywood about objects impacting Earth. How accurate is the science? This magazine will tell you.
41. An image from the movie Deep Impact and an actual image of Comet Halley.
42. Comets not only take away life, they also contain hydrocarbons that bring life.
43. If we want to know how life occurred, we need to look beyond Earth and into the surrounding space. Many compounds and elements are brought to Earth by comets.
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45. STARDUST will help us answer some of our questions about the composition of comets.
46. Jules Verne wrote a science fiction novel about traveling to a comet – now we are prepared to make his fictional story a reality.
47. The discovery of the Rosetta stone unlocked the mystery of Egyptian hieroglyphics and allowed us to read their words.
48. The Rosetta Mission, which will be launched in 2003 by the European Space Agency, will travel for 8 years through space to place a lander the size of a desktop computer on the surface of Comet 46 P/Wirtanen.
49. The mission will study the chemical composition of the comet when it is approximately the same distance away as Jupiter’s orbit.
50. CONTOUR will study three comet nuclei.
51. Deep Impact mission will launch January 2004 and reach Comet Temple 1 July 4^th, 2005. It will launch a 500 kg pure copper projectile, which will impact the comet and produce a football-sized crater. The material that is ejected by the impact will be analyzed. People with an 8-inch telescope in the southern hemisphere will be able to see the event.
52. Artistic rendition of projectile impact.
53. We do not live on an isolated planet. We are located in a solar system that is located within a galaxy and extra-terrestrial events influence events on Earth.
54. We are a curious animal and want to know what and maybe who inhabits our universe. We have launched spacecraft carrying information that we hope will be seen by others.
55. We are constantly are bombarded with space debris.
56. More debris.
57. More debris.
58. We have seen comets break up and rain their compounds, dust, and elements into the atmosphere.
59. Hale-Bopp left pieces of itself in orbit, which Earth then goes through in its orbit around the Sun.
60. Comets come from within the Solar System and from the very edges of the Solar System.
61. Comets bring compounds necessary for life to arise.
62. Comets contain life-giving nutrients.
63. And they bring them to Earth.