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Mission Status 2010
Kevin V. Gilliland Stardust Spacecraft Team
March 17, 2010
Stardust’s most recent pass was today. Stardust has contact periods in 5 of the next 7 days. Attitude control continues to operate efficiently, using approximately 3 grams of fuel each day to maintain HGA to Earth pointing. Thermal engineering reports that the PACI card temperature is just below 50 degC. This temperature is above the range where we have experienced card resets; no resets have occurred recently.Power engineering reports that all required power is being supplied, with margin. Trends show 64% of the solar array power is being used. Last week, Lockheed-Martin’s Senior Management Review Team approved our plan to write the Encounter flight software patch to EEPROM. One more contingency test remains. Commanding to the spacecraft will take place on March 30. The Tempel-1 Encounter is less than 11 months away. A countdown clock has been added to our mission website http://stardustnext.jpl.nasa.gov.
March 10, 2010
All subsystems are nominal. Stardust’s most recent pass was Monday, March 8. In the next week, four more passes are scheduled. On Monday, the solar array configuration was switched from parallel to series. The parallel configuration ensures that adequate power is produced far from the Sun. Stardust has passed perihelion, and the series configuration will be used for the remainder of the mission. The Navigation Team has recommended postponing the Trajectory Correction Maneuver (TCM) scheduled for March 17. The solution for the most recent maneuver shows all measurements are within 1-sigma of the required design, so clean-up maneuver is not required at this time. If required, the next maneuver would be executed after the scheduled swap to the spacecraft’s Side B. Test engineers achieved an important milestone today:The software patch required for 2011’s Tempel-1 Encounter has been written to the test lab’s EEPROM successfully and then installed. This test forms the foundation for a robust sequence capability for Encounter, one that can be supported from either Side A or Side B.
March 3, 2010
All subsystems are nominal. Stardust’s most recent pass was Monday. In the next week, four more passes are scheduled. Testing of software and memory configuration is underway. In May, the team plans to command to the spacecraft’s B side and the tests will assure we will have a redundant capability for Encounter. Background sequence SN034 is active, and SN035 is in development.
February 26, 2010
All subsystems are nominal. Stardust made contact today, which is our sixth contact period since the time-of-arrival adjustment maneuver on February 17. The Navigation team is collecting data from these contact periods in order to determine the precise change in trajectory due to the maneuver. We will continue with 3 to 5 passes per week for the next few weeks. Control of spacecraft orientation using the string 2 thrusters continues to be smooth and efficient. Fuel consumption is below 3 grams per day. Spacecraft Test Engineers have begun working on configuring software and data memory required for the 2011 encounter. The configuration is required to execute an encounter sequence from either of the flight computers. Stardust is now more than 237,000,000 miles from Earth. We have just passed our maximum Earth range. Background sequence SN034 is active, and SN035 is in development.
