After a seven-year, three-billion-mile expedition through the solar system, NASA’s Stardust spacecraft capsule landed in the Arizona desert on Jan. 15, 2006, with an impressive bounty: a canister full of tens of thousands of comet particles and a smattering of interstellar dust, the first such samples ever collected.
Stardust captured the comet particles from Comet Wild-2 [...]

1521 Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan reached the Philippines, where he was killed by natives the following month.
1751 James Madison, the fourth president of the United States, was born in Port Conway, Va.
1802 Congress authorized the establishment of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y.
1836 The Republic of Texas approved a constitution.
1850 “The Scarlet Letter” [...]