Stardust Status Report

August 31, 2001

There was a single two-station overlapping Deep Space Network (DSN) tracking pass in the past week, on Wednesday, August 29. Four star camera and two Navigation Camera images were taken. The star camera images are taken periodically to monitor the image quality, and images taken so far have shown no degradation in quality. The two Navigation Camera images were also for quality and performance checks. The second half of the track was over Deep Space Station 43 in Canberra, Australia, allowing a higher downlink rate. All the images have been transmitted to the ground and await analysis. A flight software patch was also uplinked during Wednesday's track, to correct a potential (but very remote) star camera software array out-of-bounds concern. This patch will ensure that if the star camera requires more than ten stars to determine a solution, the software code will handle it properly.

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