Stardust Status Report 26 May 2000
Ms. Aimee Whalen, STARDUST Opportunity Manager, and Mr. Robert Ryan,
STARDUST Mission Manager, received NASA awards for there
distinguished work on STARDUST. The STARDUST Team at JPL and at
Lockheed Martin Astronautics in Denver also received NASA group
achievement awards.
There were six Deep Space Network (DSN) tracking passes during the past
week. All subsystems onboard the spacecraft are performing normally.
Trajectory Correction Maneuver 3 (TCM 3) was completed with the
engine firing for 72 seconds to impart a velocity change of about 2
meters/second. This maneuver was performed to fine tune the spacecraft’s
trajectory for an Earth flyby next January. This Earth flyby will give
the spacecraft a gravity assist to intercept the orbit of Comet Wild 2.
The maneuver was performed flawlessly.
The STARDUST Opportunity Manager was moderator of the Women in
Science Panel Discussion, involving and honoring prominent nation
women in science, with the Cheyenne Wyoming community and public
school children. The Cheyenne Public School District and the National
Weather Service sponsored these discussions. A STARDUST display was
set up in the Denver Museum of Natural History and a presentation was
given to the Director and staff of the Space Science Institute in
Denver Colorado. Discussions were initiated with the Fiske
Planetarium in Denver to provide them with a STARDUST display. A
presentation on STARDUST was given at the European Geophysical
Society (EGS) XXV Symposium in Nice, France.
For more information on the STARDUST mission – the first ever
comet sample return mission – please visit the STARDUST home page:
