By January 2006, NASA's Stardust spacecraft will have orbited the Sun three times and spent almost seven years trawling for interplanetary dust. On the sixteenth of that month, if all goes according to plan, a washbasin‐sized capsule containing the netted dust will separate from the spacecraft, make its way toward Earth, and land softly in the Utah desert. An infrared emission feature from individual nanocrystals has been measured in the lab and matched to a similar feature in the spectra of old giant stars.