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Stardust-NEXT Mission Status Report

August 29, 2007

Artist rendition of Stardust approaching Earth Stardust continues its quiescent cruise. All subsystems are nominal. There have been five DSN contact passes since the previous report. Passes are configured to provide ranging data for Navigation in support of the upcoming Deep Space Maneuver.

The second background sequence has been prepared and will begin executing next week.

The Deep Space Maneuver (TCM-21) is 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.



Last Updated: August 29, 2007
 
     
 
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