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Mission Status 2010
Kevin V. Gilliland Stardust Spacecraft Team
February 10, 2010
All subsystems are nominal. Stardust’s most recent pass was Monday. The next pass is tomorrow, February 11. Daily passes resume Monday, February 15 in support of TCM-28. The maneuver will execute Wednesday, February 17, at 22:00 UTC. The maneuver design is complete, and uplink products are ready for review and test. Once the maneuver executes, Stardust will be on course to fly within 125 miles of Tempel-1 on February 15, 2011, 04:42 UTC. Today, Stardust is more than 413,000,000 miles from the comet. In preparation for the maneuver, Electrical Power Subsystem Engineering is exercising the battery by commanding discharge cycles. Normally, our orientation provides Sun on the solar array and the battery is not needed. For next week’s maneuver, the spacecraft will be off Sun, and using battery power.
February 3, 2010
All subsystems are nominal.Stardust’s most recent pass was today. Daily passes are scheduled through Monday, in order to accumulate tracking data for Navigation’s design of the next Trajectory Correction Maneuver (TCM). The design for the maneuver will be delivered next week; TCM-28 will execute Wednesday, February 17. Another week has passed with no PACI (input/output processor) card resets. Thermal engineering reports that the card temperature remains above 47 degC. Attitude control continues to perform efficiently, requiring 2.7 grams of fuel per day.
January 27, 2010
All subsystems are nominal. The most recent pass ended earlier today. The next pass is tomorrow, January 28.
Thermal engineering continues to monitor the temperature of the PACI, an input/output processor card. No card resets have been observed recently, and the temperature remains at (or above) 47 degC. Propulsion engineering is tracking fuel consumption at approximately 2.7 grams per day. This level of usage represents very efficient deadband control, mostly due to the spacecraft’s Z-axis settling well inside the +/- 20 deg limit. Work continues on processing Navigation’s preliminary design for TCM-28. The trajectory correction will target Tempel-1 and delay the spacecraft’s arrival by 8 hours. TCM-28 will execute on Wednesday, February 17, 2010. Stardust is now more than 235,000,000 miles from Earth; this range continues to slowly increase.
January 20, 2010
All subsystems are nominal. The most recent pass was Monday, and the next pass is tomorrow, January 21.
Thermal engineering has maintained the temperature of one of the input/output cards (PACI) above 47 degC. No card resets have been observed since the temperature has been raised to this level. Project scientists have made their recommendation for the time-of-arrival adjustment. Delaying the arrival at Tempel-1 by 8 hours will maximize the probability of providing high-resolution images of the desired surface features. The time of arrival can be most efficiently adjusted now, more than a year from encounter.Navigation has provided a preliminary solution for the desired trajectory correction maneuver (TCM). The adjustment will be implemented as TCM-28 on Wednesday, February 17, 2010. Stardust has now been in space for more than 4,000 days.
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