STARDUST Status Report
August 13, 1999
The Deep Space Network communication window on August 10 showed STARDUST to be
operating and communicating normally. The Anomaly Investigation Team has found
the apparent cause of the two recent safing events. An error from the
Sun sensor caused the Payload and Attitude Control Interface (PACI) board to
reset, as it should. Not all of the PACI interrupts were reset properly,
however, due to a software problem. As a result the star camera was unable to
communicate through the PACI board. This quite properly caused the spacecraft
to place itself in a safe state, which did reset everything. The PACI sequence
of events has been reproduced on the ground in the Spacecraft Test Laboratory.
The anomaly team is developing responses to prevent recurrences of this
situation.
The Cometary Interstellar Dust Analyzer (CIDA) team held their week-long annual
meeting this week with attendance from Lockheed Martin Astronautics (LMA) and
JPL. Major items of discussion included uplink and downlink protocols and
data analysis and archiving.
Spacecraft cruise sequence eight (SC008) will begin on August 16.
The STARDUST Teachers Workshop is being held at JPL next week running
from August 16-19.
For more information on the STARDUST mission - the first ever comet sample
return mission - please visit the STARDUST home page:
http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov
