"I have spotted the tracks of the dust particles," Dr. Peter Tsou, the deputy investigator of the mission who put forward the plan first in 1981, told Xinhua in a telephone interview.

"There are a dozen obvious tracks, and many more smaller ones in the aerogel grid," he said. The aerogel grid is a super light-weighted medium designed by Tsou for collecting and preserving the dust particles.

The science team is now inspecting the sample in NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, Tsou said. After recovering the returned capsule in a Utah desert early Sunday morning, scientists hurried to Houston to make preparation for first examining.

According to Tsou, both the capsule and the canister inside arein good shape, surviving the fierce impact and high temperature during landing process. He estimated about 1 million cometary and interstellar dust grains in the aerogel.

The capsule's science canister and its cargo of dust sample were stowed inside a special aluminum carrying case to be transferred to the Johnson Space Center earlier Tuesday. To protect the sample from being stained by airborne particles on Earth, engineers blew the case continuously with purified high-pressure nitrogen during the flight.

The mission team had also set up a clean air laboratory in Johnson Space Center for dust sample analysis, Tsou said.

"Now the task is for our science team," he said before entering the laboratory,"maybe we must work through this night."

The Stardust mission traveled about 4.5 billion kilometers during its seven-year cosmic Odyssey. It looped around the sun three times to capture interstellar dust.

In 2004, the spacecraft swooped past the comet Wild 2 and collected cometary particles. Scientists believe the precious dustsample will provide clues to fundamental questions about comets and the origin of our solar system. Enditem