Audio clips from Stardust news briefing at the Utah Test and Training Range at 6:30 a.m. Pacific time (7:30 a.m. Mountain time):

More information on Stardust: http://www.nasa.gov/stardust and http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/ .
Full podcast on Stardust: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/podcast/podcast-stardust-20051221.cfm .

CUT 1– Andy Dantzler, NASA's Solar System Exploration Division director
Running time: :12
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Transcript of CUT 1:
"After seven years and almost 2.9 billion miles in the harsh environment of space, the Stardust capsule is back on Earth, is back home and is in our hands."

CUT 2– Tom Duxbury, Stardust project manager
Running time: :24
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Transcript of CUT 2:
"We had a capable people who designed us a good spacecraft, a good return capsule to survive unbelievable harsh environments, including this last 30 minutes on its Earth return. We saw those spectacular pictures of our return capsule. It's a little thing just sitting there on the ground like it didn't even work up a sweat."

CUT 3– Joe Vellinga, deputy recovery operations manager
Running time: :18
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Transcript of CUT 3:
"I kind of view this as we're on the one yard line. The real touch down is when we open it up next Tuesday down as JSC and get the aerogel grid removed from the canister and hand it off to the science team who will be looking at it and figuring out how many particles we really did capture."

CUT 4 – Dr. Don Brownlee, Stardust principal investigator
Running time: :27
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Transcript of CUT 4:
"We did this mission to collect the most primitive materials we could in the solar system. We went to a comet that formed at the edge of the solar system. It's the same class of body as the planet Pluto, except it was smaller and it was well preserved. It formed far from the sun under very cold conditions, and we're confident it was made out of the initial building blocks of our solar system."

CUT 5– Dr. Don Brownlee, Stardust principal investigator
Running time: :22
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Transcript of CUT 5:
"This thing lasted about half a minute, constantly getting brighter and climbing in the sky. And then we started noticing there was a luminous trail, this long trail behind it. So, it's this bright, luminous, climbing thing with this glowing trail behind it. It's ironic that you have a comet mission that ends producing a comet."