PASADENA, Nov 3: Three and a half years after its launch, NASA’s Stardust spacecraft — one of the new low cost series of spacecraft with narrowly defined missions — successfully completed a close flyby of asteroid Annefrank early on Saturday, the agency said.

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena called the flyby a “dress rehearsal” for it primary target — the comet Wild 2 — in January 2004, when plans call for it to collect samples of comet dust and bring them back to earth for analysis.

The probe came within 3,300 kilometres of the asteroid, its most challenging manoeuvre since launch. Overall, after several orbits around the sun, the craft will have travelled 6 billion kilometres.

NASA said the dust collector was open on the flyby of Annefrank — named after the Dutch Jewish girl who kept a diary of her dangerous life hiding from the Nazis in World War II. But no dust was anticipated near the asteroid.

In April, Stardust set a record when it reached the farthest distance ever reached by a solar-powered spacecraft — 407 million kilometres — NASA said.

The probe is expected to return to earth in 2006.—dpa