STARDUST Status Report
April 10, 1998
Ken Atkins
STARDUST Project Manager
Activity continued to increase related to assembly of the flight system.
The Flight Cometary & Interstellar Dust Analyzer (CIDA) was delivered by
the team from Germany's Max Planck Institute. Initial setups and checkouts
were completed demonstrating
the instrument's capability to transmit examples of the kind of data it
will collect in flight. Some very important progress was also made by the
navigation camera team as they completed testing and calibration at JPL in
preparation for next week's delivery to Lockheed Martin Astronautics in
Denver, Colorado. This camera will be used to provide pictures to the
navigators as they make the final course corrections for the cometary
flythrough. It will also be the instrument
for taking the "up-close-and-personal" images of Comet Wild 2 as the spacecraft
cruises some 150 miles (about 240 kilometers) above the now-unknown surface
of the comet's nucleus. The team at Lockheed Martin Astronautics also
completed some deployment testing on the spacecraft's solar array
demonstrating how Stardust will "spread its wings" following
launch and separation from the launch rocket. Finally, a test unit of the
aerogel collector was reviewed in
preparation for using it to test how we will keep it extremely clean during
its installation and launch. It is partially loaded with examples of
flight-quality aerogel. Photos of the collector, the dust analyzer
instrument and navigation
camera are available by clicking the "photogallery" button (http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/photo/spacecraft.html) on the website.