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Originally Posted by astroron
Both space craft did sterling work, and are a credit to the scientist and their makers 
Cheers |
Yes Ron;
From the report you posted:
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"When we take into account all the possibilities for how long the burn could be and then the possible post-burn trajectories, we project that over the next 100 years, Stardust will not get any closer than 1.7 million miles of Earth's orbit, or within 13 million miles of Mars orbit," said Larson. "That is far enough from protected targets to meet all of NASA's Planetary Protection directives."
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Looks like they had to do the burn to get it into a "Planetary Protective" orbit !
Can't see why else they would have taken this path .. the cited reason was to see what would happen when they run the tanks dry, but that seems a bit hard to swallow ?
Cheers