Stardust Status Report

February 28, 2003

This past week, the Stardust flight team used the antennas of JPL's Deep Space Network on two occasions. Data relayed from the spacecraft during the two contacts indicated Stardust is healthy and all subsystems continue to run normally.

The Stardust spacecraft will transmit its images stored in the spacecraft's memory of the Pleiades star cluster the first week of March. These Pleiades images were taken by Stardust's navigation camera and will be used to evaluate performance of the spacecraft camera's periscope.

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