Stardust Status Report November 19, 1999

The STARDUST spacecraft continues to perform normally in cruise. Minimal
housekeeping activities were performed by the Flight Team at Lockheed Martin
Astronautics, with some of the planned Deep Space Network communications
sessions with the spacecraft being released for use by Mars Polar Lander
project. The Flight Team was successful in resending a Flight Software
patch that was not successfully received by the spacecraft last week.
This second try worked perfectly. All ground testing of the command and
software patch showed no problems. It is suspected that there may have
been noise in the signal received at the spacecraft during the attempt
last week to load the software patch.

The Education/Public Outreach (E/PO) team participated in the Disney
Innovative Teachers Award Ceremony where Mr. Paul Crips, a STARDUST
Teacher Fellow, was one of only 39 educators selected from 11,000 nominees
for his innovative approach to education. He was nominated by his students
and received a grant of $5,000. Also, the E/PO team participated in the Riverside
County California School District Meeting, demonstrating aerogel particle
collection and showing how classrooms can incorporate teaching about
STARDUST using areo “jello”.

For more information on the STARDUST mission – the first ever comet sample
return mission – please visit the STARDUST home page: