STARDUST Status Report

May 26, 2000

Ms. Aimee Whalen, STARDUST Opportunity Manager, and Mr. Robert Ryan, STARDUST Mission Manager, received NASA awards for there distinguished work on STARDUST. The STARDUST Team at JPL and at Lockheed Martin Astronautics in Denver also received NASA group achievement awards.

There were six Deep Space Network (DSN) tracking passes during the past week. All subsystems onboard the spacecraft are performing normally.

Trajectory Correction Maneuver 3 (TCM 3) was completed with the engine firing for 72 seconds to impart a velocity change of about 2 meters/second. This maneuver was performed to fine tune the spacecraft's trajectory for an Earth flyby next January. This Earth flyby will give the spacecraft a gravity assist to intercept the orbit of Comet Wild 2. The maneuver was performed flawlessly.

The STARDUST Opportunity Manager was moderator of the Women in Science Panel Discussion, involving and honoring prominent nation women in science, with the Cheyenne Wyoming community and public school children. The Cheyenne Public School District and the National Weather Service sponsored these discussions. A STARDUST display was set up in the Denver Museum of Natural History and a presentation was given to the Director and staff of the Space Science Institute in Denver Colorado. Discussions were initiated with the Fiske Planetarium in Denver to provide them with a STARDUST display. A presentation on STARDUST was given at the European Geophysical Society (EGS) XXV Symposium in Nice, France.

For more information on the STARDUST mission - the first ever comet sample return mission - please visit the STARDUST home page: