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Digital Lab Mission Training Be a Spacecraft Engineer

Introduction to Mission Training

STARDUST rendezvousWelcome to Mission Training! Here you'll learn what spacecraft engineers do and how we solved some of the challenges presented by the STARDUST mission.

STARDUST is an exciting new mission for NASA—it's going to rendezvous with comet Wild-2 (pronounced "vilt-2") and bring a sample of comet dust back to Earth for scientific analysis. Nothing like this has ever been done before, so the project presented us with some tough challenges.

One of the biggest challenges was doing this mission on a pretty tight budget! We decided to save money by adapting the design for another spacecraft called the Space Bus.

The Space Bus needed many modifications before it was ready for the STARDUST mission. Would you make the same modifications that we did?

Let's find out!

Spacecraft images copyright 1996-97, California Institute of Technology. All rights reserved. Further reproduction prohibited.