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STARDUST Update - April 10, 1998


                           STARDUST Status Report
                               April 10, 1998
                                 Ken Atkins
                          STARDUST Project Manager

Activity continued to increase related to assembly of the flight system. The
Flight Cometary & Interstellar Dust Analyzer (CIDA) was delivered by the
team from Germany's Max Planck Institute. Initial setups and checkouts were
completed demonstrating the instrument's capability to transmit examples of
the kind of data it will collect in flight. Some very important progress was
also made by the navigation camera team as they completed testing and
calibration at JPL in preparation for next week's delivery to Lockheed
Martin Astronautics in Denver, Colorado. This camera will be used to provide
pictures to the navigators as they make the final course corrections for the
cometary flythrough. It will also be the instrument for taking the
"up-close-and-personal" images of Comet Wild 2 as the spacecraft cruises
some 150 miles (about 240 kilometers) above the now-unknown surface of the
comet's nucleus. The team at Lockheed Martin Astronautics also completed
some deployment testing on the spacecraft's solar array demonstrating how
Stardust will "spread its wings" following launch and separation from the
launch rocket. Finally, a test unit of the aerogel collector was reviewed in
preparation for using it to test how we will keep it extremely clean during
its installation and launch. It is partially loaded with examples of
flight-quality aerogel. Photos of the collector, the dust analyzer
instrument and navigation camera are available by clicking the
"photogallery" button (http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/photo/spacecraft.html)
on the website.

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

http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov