NASA Spacecraft Pinpoints Where the Wild Thing is

"December 1, 2003 Forty-nine days before its historic rendezvous with a comet, NASA's Stardust spacecraft successfully photographed its quarry, comet Wild 2 (pronounced Vilt-2), from 25 million kilometers (15.5 million miles) away. The image, the first of many comet portraits it will take over the next four weeks, will aid Stardust’s navigators and scientists as they plot their final trajectory toward a Jan. 2, 2004 flyby and collection of samples from Wild 2. “Christmas came early this year,” said Project Manager Tom Duxbury at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. “Our job is to aim a 5 meter (16 foot) long spacecraft at a 5.4 kilometer (3.3 mile) wide comet that is closing on it at six times the speed of a bullet. We plan to “miss the comet” by all of 300 kilometers (188 miles), and all this will be happening 389 million kilometers (242 million miles) away from home. By finding the comet as early and as far away as we did, the complexity of our operations leading up to encounter just dropped drastically.”

NASA News Release and photo.

32 days and counting.
SteveS