Stardust Status Report

August 10, 2001

There was one Deep Space Network (DSN) tracking pass this week and all subsystems are performing normally. Spacecraft contact and operations were minimized for the past two weeks to give priority to DSN and flight teams on Wednesday's successful NASA Discovery Genesis launch.

There have been no interstellar dust particle hits on the Cometary and Interstellar Dust Analyzer (CIDA) instrument during the last two months. Commands were successfully sent to increase the sensitivity of the CIDA detection target to produce additional science data. This second CIDA interstellar collection period will end next month: the instrument will be turned off to conserve power, since the spacecraft is out beyond 2.4 AU (about 359 million kilometers, or 223 million miles) from the Sun.

The project was able to report excellent status of its resources, schedule and technical accomplishments at the quarterly Governing Program Management Council (GPMC) review by NASA and JPL management.

The search for a replacement SGI Challenger computer for the Spacecraft Test Laboratory has been stopped. Instead, the current SGI Onyx 200 MHz CPU boards will be upgraded to 250 MHz under full configuration management and test processes.

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