Stardust-NEXT Mission Status Report
September 12, 2007
Stardust is continuing its quiescent cruise and all subsystems are
nominal. There have been many Deep Space Network tracks during the
past week.
The project has decided to delay the execution of Deep Space Maneuver 1 (DSM 1) to October
10, 2007 to allow additional tracking and planning time for the
development of the maneuver parameters.
An internal meeting was held to assign action items to determine the
cause of the EEPROM byte corruption and identify any impacts to
spacecraft operation. Since the corruption is in an unused portion
of the EEPROM, our initial assessment is no threat to the
spacecraft. Our first task is to confirm that assessment. Weekly
meeting are scheduled to track the progress.
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.
