Stardust-NEXT Mission Status Report
August 8, 2007
The Stardust spacecraft is currently exiting from solar conjunction
and is 281 million kilometers from Earth. We are developing command
products to re-establish contact on Monday August 13th. After
re-establishing communications we will assess the health of the
spacecraft and take it out of hibernation mode. A Deep Space
Maneuver is planned for mid-September to target an Earth flyby in
January 2009.
The Stardust-NExT (New Exploration of Tempel 1) mission is to flyby
the comet Tempel 1 on February 14, 2011 in order to obtain high
resolution images of the coma and nucleus, as well as measurements
of the composition, size distribution, and flux of dust emitted into
the coma. We have developed a reliable plan to update knowledge of
the rotational phase of the comet sufficiently well to have a high
probability of viewing significant portions of the hemisphere
studied by Deep Impact (DI) in 2005 and a high probability of
imaging the crater made by its impactor. The impact event produced
so much ejecta that DI did not succeed in imaging the crater.