STARDUST Status Report

March 12, 1999

Ken Atkins
STARDUST Project Manager

STARDUST was successfully placed into its Cruise 2 configuration last Sunday March 7 where the spacecraft turns to point the medium gain antenna to Earth for communications at a higher data rate than the low gain antenna used when the spacecraft was much closer to Earth. Also, testing of the star camera was started late Monday in preparation to use it in a "tracking" mode to relieve control of the spacecraft attitude by the gyro inertial measurement unit (IMU). Moving to "all stellar" control will preserve operating life on the IMU for the encounter and other gyro-required operations. After an hour of successful testing, as the tracking mode was introduced, a star camera data-read error occurred causing the spacecraft to automatically move to its previous "safe" mode (Cruise 1 configuration), switching back to the low gain antenna and minimizing operations until it received new commands from controllers on Earth.

The flight operations team moved back to communications with the spacecraft over the low gain antenna and verified that the spacecraft was in its expected state and in excellent health. Late Tuesday March 8, the data history on the testing was "downlinked" to mission controllers so that a detailed trace could be done on what caused the data error and subsequent automatic action by the spacecraft's fault protection system. Detailed analysis of the data and track mode software sequence is underway to understand the suspect operation and correct it.