Stardust Status Report

March 14, 2003

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

During the Deep Space Network pass, the Stardust spacecraft transmitted 5 of the 32 images stored in the spacecraft's memory of the Pleiades star cluster. These Pleiades images were taken by Stardust's navigation camera and are being used to evaluate performance of the spacecraft camera's periscope. The image quality and calibration data from these images is very good. The Stardust team will download the remaining 27 images during an upcoming Deep Space Network pass on March 22.

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