Stardust Status Report

February 7, 2003

This past week, the Stardust flight team had three 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 continue to run normally.

This past week saw the Cometary and Interplanetary Dust Analyzer returned to operations. The Stardust team ran a calibration test on the instrument and found it to be operating 'as advertised.' The Cometary and Interplanetary Dust Analyzer is a mass spectrometer that will be used to study the chemical composition of individual particulates in the comet's coma during Stardust's encounter with Comet Wild 2 in January 2004. It will operate 24/7 until after Stardust's encounter with Comet Wild 2 329 days from today.

Information on the present position and orbits of the Stardust spacecraft and Comet Wild 2 may be found on the "Where Is Stardust Right Now?" web page located at:

http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/scnow.html

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