Stardust-NEXT Mission Status Report
October 3, 2007
Stardust is continuing its quiescent cruise and
all subsystems are nominal as preparations for
the Deep Space Maneuver (DSM) continue.
The DSM is approximately 3.5 m/s burn with the
sun edge-on to the solar panels on the -Y side
of the spacecraft. This burn attitude means
there will be no real-time communications
possible however the telemetry will be recorded
and played back when communication is
re-established when the spacecraft returns to
its nominal earth-point attitude. The maneuver
execution starts at 9 am (MDT) on Wednesday,
October 10.
Planning for the first de-contamination of the
Navigation Camera is in development. As was
done during the Stardust mission we will rotate
the spacecraft to place the sun on the bottom
side in order to raise the CCD temperature to
about 27 degrees C.
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.
