Just a few days after its fall to Earth last weekend, NASA says the Stardust sample is a huge success.

The Stardust capsule that returned to earth last weekend is a huge success, says NASA. The Johnson Space Center in Houston
opened the capsule and said it exceeds all expectations.

A preliminary estimation is that there might be more than a million microscopic specks of dust embedded in Stardust’s aerogel-laden collector. Furthermore, it appears — from the size of the carrot-shaped impact tracks in the aerogel — that there are about 10 particles of 100 microns in size. (A typical human hair is about 100 microns thick.)

The largest is around a millimeter, Brownlee added, and the biggest track is nearly large enough to insert your little finger. In the largest aerogel tracks, investigators can see the black comet dust at the end of the track.

Johnson Space Center will be the curator of the samples collected by Stardust from Comet Wild 2, as well as the interstellar dust particles that Stardust snagged during its nearly seven-year voyage. As many as 150 scientists worldwide are awaiting samples to study.