Comets
Most histories of the mission end right there, with Mariner 4 buzzing Mars - "the first spacecraft to visit the red planet" - and throwing cold water on a lot of good science fiction. But there's more to the story. After the flyby, something strange happened to Mariner 4, setting the stage for a 40-year mystery.
Last month, the asteroid 2004 XP14 passed some 268,873 miles (432,000 kilometers) from Earth. That distance is slightly greater than that between the Earth and the moon.
Astronomers called it "a close shave in the vastness of outer space."
The study conducted at the School of Pure and Applied Physics of the MG University here by Dr Godfrey Louis and his student Santosh Kumar shows that red rain cells were devoid of DNA which suggests their extra-terrestrial origin.
The capsule's blazing plunge through the atmosphere lit up parts of the western sky as it capped a mission in which the Stardust spacecraft swooped past a comet known as Wild 2.
"This is not the finish line. This is just the intermediate pit stop," said project manager Tom Duxbury of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA, which managed the $212 million mission.
Farmer Don Vernon lives on the property next to where the object hit the ground, and watched it come in to land.
"I was finished on the farm and driving home, and as I came in the gate I faced this enormous green ball of light with a white centre.
"We are very well acquainted with the trajectory of Comet 73P Schwassmann-Wachmann 3," said Don Yeomans, manager of the agency's Near-Earth Object Program, at Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "There is absolutely no danger to people on the ground or the inhabitants of the International Space Station, as the main body of the object and any pieces from the breakup will pass many millions of miles beyond the Earth."
David Jewitt and Henry Hsieh have dubbed the new population "main belt comets". They describe three objects with near circular, flat orbits in the asteroid belt that stream volatile materials, producing an observable tail for weeks and months at a time.
The finding backs a theory that ice-bearing asteroids - or "comets" - from this much closer region may have played an important role in forming the Earth's oceans.
For no apparent reason, the comet's nucleus split into at least three "mini-comets" flying single file through space. Astronomers watched with interest, but the view was blurry even through large telescopes. The comet was a hundred and fifty million miles away.
We're about to get a much closer look. In May 2006 the fragments are going to fly past Earth closer than any comet has come in almost eighty years.
Comment: None of this hoopla has happened before when a comet when sailing by the planet. NASA just stated it wasn't a threat, and that was that. If they are so confident that none of the 73P fragments will hit, why are they scrambling all their resources this time "to provide further reassurances"??