Stardust Status Report

September 14, 2001

There was one Deep Space Network (DSN) tracking pass this week and all subsystems are healthy. Two flight software patches were sent up to the spacecraft, verified and stored into permanent (CMIC) memory. Also three other flight software patches that have been up and operating successfully for a few weeks were also stored into CMIC memory. In the event of a future computer reset, these patches will not have to be retransmitted to the spacecraft but will automatically be operational after the reset.

Because of the large distance from Earth to the spacecraft, the radiometric ranging data has been showing signs of increasing noise. The ranging mod was set to high to improve the ranging signal-to-noise ratio and will be left at high for the next year as the STARDUST spacecraft is in the main asteroid belt.

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