Stardust Status Report

August 8, 2003

There were four Deep Space Network passes during the past week and all Stardust subsystems are performing normally.

The Stardust flight team is continuing its effort to finalize all plans for the Comet Wild 2 encounter. An 'Encounter Workshop' is scheduled for mid-August to complete all encounter action items. Numerous meeting were held this past week with project management science and engineering to finalize all issues effecting encounter sequence and encounter timeline decisions. Final decisions about the approach, encounter and departure sequences and operations for Stardust's encounter with Comet Wild 2 will be made at the workshop. Formal reviews of these decisions and plans will then follow.

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