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Another challenge for
engineers came from the comet itself. To collect particles of the comet, the
STARDUST craft must plunge through the comet's coma. Comets have been described
as "dirty snowballs"—and STARDUST will fly past this snowball at 21,000
km/hour! Ouch!
So how should we protect the spacecraft from these tiny but forceful impacts?
Install ceramic blankets and cloth bumpers |
Create electromagnetic force field around spacecraft |
Use an absorbant silicon material called aerogel |
| Spacecraft images copyright 1996-97, California Institute of Technology. All rights reserved. Further reproduction prohibited. |