Stardust-NEXT Mission Status Report
September 6, 2007
Stardust is continuing its quiescent cruise and all subsystems are
nominal. There have many Deep Space Network tracks in support of
the upcoming Deep Space Maneuver on September 19.
Background sequence SN002 successfully starting execution on Sunday
and the first task is to perform CRC checks of Stardust's memories.
The check of the file system in EEPROM did not match the ground
truth indicating that some location has been corrupted. During the
DSN track on Tuesday we downloaded the affected area of memory to
determine where the change occurred and to assess the impact if a
reboot were to occur. During a reboot the code contained in EEPROM
is copied to DRAM where it executes. A corrupted EEPROM, depending
on the location, could prevent the spacecraft from booting on Side A
and would result in a swap to the B side. The team will be
examining the memory dump and comparing with the Spacecraft Test
Laboratory to determine the best course of action to correct the
situation.
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.
