Lessons Learned from Three Recent Sample Return Missions

We share lessons learned from participation on the Science Teams and Recovery/Preliminary Examination/Curation teams for three recent sample return missions: (1) the Long Duration Exposure Facility (LDEF), which returned to Earth with interplanetary dust and spacecraft debris particles in 1990, (2) the Stardust Mission, which returned grains from comet Wild-2 and fresh interstellar dust to Earth in 2006, and (3) the Hayabusa Mission, which returned regolith grains from asteroid Itokawa in 2010.