Digital Still Snapshots of the Stardust Sample Return Capsule Entry

摘要

The 15 January 2006 reentry of the Stardust Sample Return capsule was photographed from 11.2-km altitudenonboard NASA’s DC-8 Airborne Laboratory in a series of brief 1/320 s exposures with a Nikon D70 digital stillncamera.The entrywas detected from09:57:13.5 to 09:57:53.5UTC.Other instruments have demonstrated thatmostnof the observed broadband flux is due to gray body radiation from the hot surface of the thermal protection system,nexcept in the very beginning when strong emission lines of zinc froman ablating paint layer contributed significantlynto the blue band. The measured flux in the green band was used to measure the surface-averaged temperaturenvariation during flight, and the corresponding flux in the blue and red bands were used to verify the expectednwavelength dependence of the gray body emission.