STARDUST Status Report

November 19, 1999

The STARDUST spacecraft continues to perform normally in cruise. Minimal housekeeping activities were performed by the Flight Team at Lockheed Martin Astronautics, with some of the planned Deep Space Network communications sessions with the spacecraft being released for use by Mars Polar Lander project. The Flight Team was successful in resending a Flight Software patch that was not successfully received by the spacecraft last week. This second try worked perfectly. All ground testing of the command and software patch showed no problems. It is suspected that there may have been noise in the signal received at the spacecraft during the attempt last week to load the software patch.

The Education/Public Outreach (E/PO) team participated in the Disney Innovative Teachers Award Ceremony where Mr. Paul Crips, a STARDUST Teacher Fellow, was one of only 39 educators selected from 11,000 nominees for his innovative approach to education. He was nominated by his students and received a grant of $5,000. Also, the E/PO team participated in the Riverside County California School District Meeting, demonstrating aerogel particle collection and showing how classrooms can incorporate teaching about STARDUST using areo "jello".

For more information on the STARDUST mission - the first ever comet sample return mission - please visit the STARDUST home page: