Stardust Status Report

June 15, 2001

The Stardust spacecraft is in excellent health. There was one Deep Space Network tracking pass this past week and all subsystems are performing normally.

The Navigation Camera and the Cometary and Interstellar Dust Analyzer (CIDA) continue to provide excellent observations of their targets. CIDA continues to observe the interstellar dust stream with an optimal spacecraft attitude when not in communication with Earth.

The Comet Wild 2 encounter background star images were downlinked and are being analyzed for geometric accuracy and stray light. At this distance from the Sun and at this attitude, no stray light is expected in the short exposures used for Comet Wild 2 flyby. A final non-contaminated image will be taken in early July, ending the navigation camera's characterization. The camera's performance is excellent.

A flight software patch to increase the message queue size for the science instrument software was successfully installed on the spacecraft.

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