NASA’s Stardust mission wasn’t originally built to question the origins of life, but its results may reshape that conversation. Tasked with collecting particles from comet Wild 2, Stardust ...

NASA’s Stardust-NExT (New Exploration of Tempel) spacecraft fired its engines for 22 minutes 53 seconds on Feb. 17 to purposely delay its arrival at comet Tempel 1 by 8 hours 21 minutes. In o… ...

The first image of comet Tempel 1 taken by NASA’s Stardust spacecraft is a composite made from observations on Jan. 18 and 19, 2011. On Valentine’s Day (Feb. 14 in […] ...

On Jan. 14, NASA’s Stardust-NExT spacecraft will fly by Earth during a gravity assist maneuver that will increase its velocity and sling shot the spacecraft into an orbit to meet up with comet ...

Stardust has traveled approximately 3.7 billion kilometers (approximately 2.3 billion miles) since its February 7, 1999 launch. It is closing the gap with Wild 2 at 22, kph (approximately 13,640 mph).

Launched on Feb. 7, 1999, Stardust trekked more than 2.3 billion miles through the inner solar system to intercept Wild 2, which was 242 million miles from the Earth on Friday.

The spacecraft Stardust is scheduled to return to Earth and land in the Utah desert early Sunday morning after a seven-year, 3 billion-mile voyage. Viewing possibilities: The spacecraft may be ...

The Stardust spacecraft now begins its two-year, 1.1 billion km (708 million mile) trek back to Earth, where it will drop off a capsule containing particles that could hold clues to how the solar ...