Dawn

The Dawn Mission is a NASA unmanned space mission that will send an orbiting space probe to examine the asteroids Ceres and Vesta. Dawn will be the first mission to enter into orbit around two different planetary bodies other than the Earth and Moon. The purpose of this video is to deliver an educational video experience about the mission to the general public.

The JPL web site states:

Leonard Nimoy narrates this brilliantly animated 13-minute glimpse of NASA's Dawn mission scheduled to launch in July, 2007. The movie features a look into the planning, instrumentation and technological challenges of this one-of-a kind mission into the heart of the asteroid belt.

Stardust

Stardust is the first U.S. space mission dedicated solely to the exploration of a comet, and the first robotic mission designed to return extraterrestrial material from outside the orbit of the Moon.

The Stardust spacecraft was launched on February 7, 1999, from Cape Canaveral Air Station, Florida, aboard a Delta II rocket. The primary goal of Stardust is to collect dust and carbon-based samples during its closest encounter with Comet Wild 2 - pronounced "Vilt 2" after the name of its Swiss discoverer - is a rendezvous scheduled to take place in January 2004, after nearly four years of space travel.

Genesis - Search for Origins

About 4.6 billion years ago, the solar nebula transformed into the present solar system. In order to chemically model the processes which drove that transformation, we would, ideally, like to have a sample of that original nebula to use as a baseline from which we can track changes. NASA’s Genesis sample-return mission 1 is designed to give us just such a baseline composition 2.

It has collected solar wind, material which is ejected from the outer portion of the sun, and returned it to Earth. This material can be thought of as a fossil of our nebula because the preponderance of scientific evidence suggests that the outer layer of our sun has not changed measurably for billions of years.

Moreover, for most rock-forming elements, there appears to be little fractionation of either elements or isotopes between the sun and the solar wind.