STARDUST Status Report

October 30, 1998

Ken Atkins
STARDUST Project Manager

Greetings from sunny Florida. We are now shifting our center of activities to the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) to begin the "launch campaign." So the project office has traveled to KSC and is busily setting up shop in preparations for the arrival of STARDUST on the early morning of the 12th of November. The flight system is currently "open" on its handling facility at Lockheed Martin. We removed a couple of electronics boxes for some inspection and rework. Soon the spacecraft will be closed up and packaged for its trip to Florida aboard a C-17 aircraft.

The project held a "pre-ship review" last week at Lockheed Martin in Denver, Colorado. The review board reached unanimous consensus that STARDUST is ready to ship to Cape Canaveral on schedule the evening of November 11. This was a very important and significant event for the project, signaling that the spacecraft design and development phase has been successful, e.g. the assembly and test, and we are ready to begin the launch operations phase to integrate with the Delta II rocket.

The STARDUST webcam was successfully installed at KSC for viewing the activities in the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility (PHSF). You can get a preview of the area at: