Stardust Science Update
The 2007 round of sample processing and allocations of Cosmic Dust has been completed. The Cosmic Dust Lab (CDL)
at Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, will be closed down and cleaned in order to resume work associated with processing of the Interstellar Tray from Stardust.
Stardust Post-Bake Images Returned
On Thursday, November 8, the remainders of the post-bake Navigation Camera (NAVCAM) images were received on the ground. The de-fragmentation of the memory, reducing the memory free list, was performed during the tracking pass on Friday, November 9. All subsystems are nominal as Stardust continues its quiescent cruise.
Stardust Recovered from Safemode
Stardust was completing the camera decontamination process last week when it went into safemode while taking images.
Communications were re-established with the spacecraft and fault history was downlinked along with other error and engineering data, leading to the root cause of the safe mode entry to be identified
Stardust's Big Surprise
The comet particles returned by the Stardust mission have been a real bonanza. They do contain some stardust grains from other stars but the majority of solids are solar system materials that appear to have formed over a very broad range of solar distances and perhaps over an extended time range.
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