Stardust-NEXT Mission Status Report
August 22, 2007
Stardust continues its quiescent cruise while passing through
perihelion this week, 0.92 AU (approximately 85,000,000 miles) from
the sun. The first NExT background was successfully loaded onto the
spacecraft during the communication track on Tuesday, August 21.
The Deep Space Maneuver is presently scheduled to execute on
September 19 and is a 5 m/s burn. This maneuver will place the
spacecraft on a trajectory to perform an Earth Gravity Assist 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.
