Stardust Status Report

March 16, 2001

There were three Deep Space Network (DSN) tracking passes in the past week and all subsystems are performing normally.

The spacecraft was oriented to point the German Cometary and Interplanetary Dust Analyzer (CIDA) instrument into the interstellar dust stream and maintain such an orientation for the next few months. CIDA has already detected 5 particle hits since being turned on about 1 month ago.

The STARDUST mural that is hanging in the main hall of NASA Headquarters is being moved to the Baltimore Science Center as part of its display tour around the country. The STARDUST Outreach team made presentations on comets and asteroids at the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles and on STARDUST at the JPL/NASA Educator Resource Center in Pomona, California. Outreach also participated in the Native American Initiative Educator Workshop in Shonto, Arizona that featured STARDUST and comet exploration. Principal Investigator, Don Brownlee, participated in the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston, Texas.

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

http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov