Stardust Status Report

August 21, 2001

The Stardust spacecraft went into safe mode last Thursday, August 16. Communications with the spacecraft has been re-established and fault data has been downloaded to confirm that an error occurred onboard the spacecraft. On Monday, August 20, the Stardust spacecraft was placed back into its normal operations mode. As previously planned, two software patches will be transmitted to the spacecraft tomorrow during the normal Deep Space Network (DSN) pass, and we expect good results.

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