Stardust Status Report

February 15, 2002

There was one Deep Space Network (DSN) tracking pass in the past week, and all subsystems are performing normally.

The Power Subsystem onboard the Stardust spacecraft continues to perform better than predicted, but the remaining three tracking passes in the current flight sequence will be reduced to approximately 2 hours to ensure the battery State of Charge (SOC) does not go below 80%. A conservative approach will be taken to minimizing spacecraft communications during the next 3 months while the spacecraft is more than 2.6 AU from the Sun.

The Stardust Imaging Science team gave a colloquium to the Department of Physics and Astronomy at California State University, Los Angeles.

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