Stardust Sample Return Capsule

Stardust was a mission to fly through a comet's tail and collect some of its dust for return to Earth.

Stardust was somewhat similar in execution to the Genesis mission (to collect solar wind particles), but with a more successful ending than Genesis (which famously crashed in the Utah desert).

Other notable cometary missions include NASA's Deep Impact (which fired an impactor into comet Tempel 1 to study the ejected material) and ESA's Rosetta mission, which on November 12, 2014 soft-landed a probe on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The Rosetta orbiter will continue to follow the comet as it approaches the sun, to study how solar exposure affects the comet.