Stardust Celebrates Twelve Years With Rocket Burn
NASA's Stardust-NExT mission team on Earth marked the spacecraft's 12th anniversary in space with a flight path correction maneuver...
PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA's Stardust spacecraft marked its 12th
anniversary in space on Monday, Feb. 7, with a rocket burn to further
refine its path toward a Feb. 14 date with a comet.
The half-minute trajectory correction maneuver, which adjusts the
spacecraft's flight path, began at about 1 p.m. PST (4 p.m. EST) on
Monday, Feb. 7. The 30-second-long firing of the spacecraft's rockets
consumed about 69 grams (2.4 ounces) of fuel and changed the
spacecraft's speed by 0.56 meters per second (1.3 mph).
NASA's plan for the Stardust-NExT mission is to fly the spacecraft
to a point in space about 200 kilometers (124 miles) from comet Tempel
1 at the time of its closest approach. During the encounter, the
spacecraft will take images of the surface of comet Tempel 1 to observe
what changes have occurred since a NASA spacecraft last visited.
(NASA's Deep Impact flew by Tempel 1 in July 2005).
Along with the high-resolution images of the comet's surface,
Stardust-NExT will also measure the composition, size distribution and
flux of dust emitted into the coma, and provide important new
information about how comets evolve.
Stardust was launched on Feb. 7, 1999. This current Stardust-NExT
target is a bonus mission for the comet chaser, which flew past comet
Wild 2 in 2004 and returned particles from its coma to Earth.
While its sample return capsule parachuted to Earth in January
2006, mission controllers were placing the still-viable spacecraft on a
path that would allow NASA the opportunity to re-use the already-proven
flight system if a target of opportunity presented itself. In January
2007, NASA re-christened the mission "Stardust-NExT" (New Exploration
of Tempel), and the Stardust team began a four-and-a-half year journey
for the spacecraft to comet Tempel 1. The spacecraft has traveled more
than 3.5 billion miles since launch.
For more information about Stardust-NExT, please visit: http://stardustnext.jpl.nasa.gov .
