Stardust-NEXT Mission Status Report
October 10, 2007
Stardust successfully performed Deep Space Maneuver 1 during today's
Deep Space Network (DSN) tracking pass. The spacecraft is nominal as it continues its
quiescent cruise.
The 3.57 m/s maneuver started at 9 am (MDT) today. The maneuver
attitude did not allow contact, so the spacecraft was out of contact
for approximately 13 minutes. After re-establishing
communications, the telemetry showed all subsystems performed as
expected. This was the first maneuver without the Sample Return
Capsule where an accurate burn performance was required. The
spacecraft's performance was the same as the many previous maneuvers
during the Stardust mission. The divert burn in January 2006, the
first without the SRC, did not require an accurate performance; the
goal was to divert from Earth.
On Friday, October 12, commands will be sent to take images using
the Navigation Camera (NAVCAM) in preparations for the
de-contamination ("bake" maneuver) on October 18. These images will
document the current NAVCAM performance. After the pre-images are
taken, we will turn on the NAVCAM CCD heaters to raise the CCD
temperature as much as possible prior to the "bake" maneuver on the
18th. The post de-contamination images will be taken on October 25
to measure the effectiveness of the de-contamination effort.
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.
