Stardust Status Report Jan 10, 2003
During this past week, the Stardust flight team had two periods of
communication with the spacecraft courtesy of the antennas of JPL’s Deep
Space Network. The telemetry relayed during this interval indicated the
spacecraft is healthy and all subsystems were running normally.
On Tuesday, January 2, 2003, the countdown clock to Stardust’s encounter
with Comet Wild 2 dropped below the one-year mark. Next month (February 7,
2003), will be another milestone as Stardust begins its third year of space
exploration. These milestones, and the entire Stardust mission, were
chronicled by Stardust’s Principle Investigator, Donald Brownlee of the
University of Washington, during his January 6, keynote speech to the American
Astronomical Society in Seattle.
For more information on the Stardust mission — the first ever comet
sample-return mission — please visit the Stardust home page:
