Stardust Status Report August 10, 2001
There was one Deep Space Network (DSN) tracking pass this week and
all subsystems are performing normally. Spacecraft contact and
operations were minimized for the past two weeks to give priority to
DSN and flight teams on Wednesday’s successful NASA Discovery Genesis
launch.
There have been no interstellar dust particle hits on the Cometary and
Interstellar Dust Analyzer (CIDA) instrument during the last two months.
Commands were successfully sent to increase the sensitivity of the
CIDA detection target to produce additional science data. This second
CIDA interstellar collection period will end next month: the instrument
will be turned off to conserve power, since the spacecraft is out beyond
2.4 AU (about 359 million kilometers, or 223 million miles) from the Sun.
The project was able to report excellent status of its resources, schedule
and technical accomplishments at the quarterly Governing Program Management
Council (GPMC) review by NASA and JPL management.
The search for a replacement SGI Challenger computer for the Spacecraft
Test Laboratory has been stopped. Instead, the current SGI Onyx 200 MHz CPU
boards will be upgraded to 250 MHz under full configuration management and
test processes.
For more information on the Stardust mission — the first ever comet sample
return mission — please visit the Stardust home page:
