THE fastest man-made object ever to plunge through Earth’s atmosphere landed safely in the Utah desert at 3.10 am on 15 January. Within hours of parachuting down, NASA’s Stardust capsule was retrieved and flown to a clean room in a nearby hangar. It was a triumphant finale to a seven-year mission to bring back pristine dust from comet Wild 2, with the hope of gaining insights into the origins of our solar system.
But even as it descended, the capsule was already the focus of a diverse array of experiments designed to study something entirely different: meteors. It did not…
