Stardust Status Report 15 Feb 2002
There was one Deep Space Network (DSN) tracking pass in the past week,
and all subsystems are performing normally.
The Power Subsystem onboard the Stardust spacecraft continues to perform
better than predicted, but the remaining three tracking passes in the current
flight sequence will be reduced to approximately 2 hours to ensure the battery
State of Charge (SOC) does not go below 80%. A conservative approach will be
taken to minimizing spacecraft communications during the next 3 months while
the
spacecraft is more than 2.6 AU from the Sun.
The Stardust Imaging Science team gave a colloquium to the Department of
Physics and
Astronomy at California State University, Los Angeles.
For more information on the Stardust mission — the first ever
comet sample return mission — please visit the Stardust home page:
