Stardust Mission Update

NASA's Stardust Mission is proceeding at the Stardust clean room at Johnson Space Center in Houston. According to NASA, "...the Preliminary Examination Team along with JSC Curatorial staff have been making good progress toward processing the returned samples. The processing is ahead of planned schedule on several fronts."

Meanwhile, on 29 January NASA placed the Stardust spacecraft into hibernation mode after almost seven years of space flight and its successful return of the Stardust sample capsule. NASA announced, "We sang our spacecraft to sleep today with a melody of digital ones and zeros," said Tom Duxbury, Stardust project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California. "Stardust has performed flawlessly these last seven years and 2.88 billion miles and deserves a rest for a while, like the rest of the team."

The hibernation procedure shut down everything but key systems, such as the solar arrays and receive antenna. The procedure will keep the spacecraft potentially usable for decades should NASA find another possible application for the spacecraft in the future.

The Stardust spacecraft is in an elliptical orbit around the Sun that extends from slightly closer to the Sun than Earth's orbit to well beyond the orbit of Mars. NASA calculates that this orbit will bring Stardust within about 1 million kilometers (621,300 miles) of Earth on 14 January 2009.

The Stardust mission web site is at www.nasa.gov/stardust .

For details about the return of the Stardust capsule, see "NASA's Stardust Mission Safely Home," The Citizen Scientist, 27 January 2006.

Citizen scientists who want to participate in the Stardust project can find details at "Help Wanted: NASA's Stardust Mission Needs Volunteers!" The Citizen Scientist, 27 January 2006.

Forrest M. Mims III