Stardust Status Report

January 10, 2003

During this past week, the Stardust flight team had two periods of communication with the spacecraft courtesy of the antennas of JPL's Deep Space Network. The telemetry relayed during this interval indicated the spacecraft is healthy and all subsystems were running normally.

On Tuesday, January 2, 2003, the countdown clock to Stardust's encounter with Comet Wild 2 dropped below the one-year mark. Next month (February 7, 2003), will be another milestone as Stardust begins its third year of space exploration. These milestones, and the entire Stardust mission, were chronicled by Stardust's Principle Investigator, Donald Brownlee of the University of Washington, during his January 6, keynote speech to the American Astronomical Society in Seattle.

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