The way we were

Could it be? Is interstellar space filled with dusty debris from the creation of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago?

Scientists will have a chance to answer the question because University of Washington astronomer Dr. Donald Brownlee suggested the inquiry be pursued 25 years ago. A proposal to chase down Halley's Comet was rejected by NASA, but he persevered to lead the dazzling scientific and engineering feat achieved this weekend. Brownlee is the principal scientist for the Stardust explorer mission, which lasted seven years and covered 2.9 billion miles in space. The bold trip ended Sunday morning after a 32-inch, sample-filled capsule blazed through Earth's atmosphere to a parachute landing on a Utah mud flat.

The next step of the $212 million Stardust enterprise will be to dole out the collected particles to researchers around the world. "We fully expect some of the comet particles to be older than the sun," Brownlee said Sunday.

Stardust's triumph builds off the failure of an earlier mission that ended with a crash in 2004 and the contamination of the samples brought back from space. For all the disappointment and expense, there is no reluctance to talk of ever-bolder unmanned exploration.

Opportunities and dangerous initiatives beyond human limits reinforce concerns about sending human explorers into ever-more complex missions. In recent years, the Space Shuttle program downshifted into potentially dangerous resupply runs with vague scientific rationales.

Manned space flight has political and emotional limitations that do not burden the efforts of Brownlee and his colleagues. There are financial limitations, to be sure, but nothing relaxes the purse strings like success.

As Earthlings argue the merits of human space travel, more and more work like Stardust can be undertaken; that's another achievement of this successful mission.

Part of the excitement is what comes next from the research. Scientists humming the praise of Stardust's achievement will join the song lyricists to tell us of "The music of the years gone by."