NASA’s Stardust spacecraft is traveling at a speed of 590,000 miles a day (24,583.3 miles per hour) to keep its scheduled rendezvous to make a close pass by comet Tempel 1 on Valentine’s Day, at a distance of only 124 miles from the comet’s nucleus.

Stardust was launched on February 7, 1999 and has already completed its mission. Stardust is the first spacecraft to collect samples from a comet (Comet Wild 2) and returned the samples by parachuting the return capsule as it passed by Earth in January 2007.

The second mission named Stardust-NExt (New Exploration of Tempel) began its four and a half year journey to the next comet. This is the second mission to comet Tempel 1, the first was the spacecraft Deep Impact. The images from each mission will be compared for any changes on the comet’s surface.

Stardust-Next will take high-resolution images of the comet’s surface and measure the composition, size distribution and flux of dust emitted by the coma. Scientists hope it will provide important new information on the evolution and formation of these types of comets called “Jupiter-family” comets that were formed 4.6 billion years ago.

Stardust-NExt is a very low cost mission being managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. The spacecraft was built by Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver, Colorado.