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STARDUST Update - August 14, 1998

                           STARDUST Status Report
                               August 14, 1998
                                 Ken Atkins
                          STARDUST Project Manager

Assembly, Test, and Launch Operations (ATLO) activities: The principal
activities this week were completion of pre-environmental test functional
testing, frequency survey, dynamic propellant simulation load, and acoustics
testing. The frequency survey and the acoustic tests were about checking the
spacecraft's ability to avoid any natural harmonics that could damage it, or
seeing if any induced vibration (waves) can damage it, respectively. Some of
you may recall old film clips showing how a suspension bridge over a river
was destroyed when winds excited some unstable natural frequencies in the
bridge structure. The vibration caused the bridge to swing and gallop so
wildly it crashed. We want to be sure Stardust doesn't have anything like
that in its character. So....we test. Then in the acoustics case we want to
be sure things like vibrations from the rumbling rocket engines transferring
up to where we are riding in the shroud don't shake apart our spacecraft.
So....we test. In both cases this week, we were very successful. Our bird
looks pretty tough! The flight system continues to show no hardware
functional problems as we prepare for the environmental test. The
environmental test is when we put the whole system in a big vacuum chamber
and simulate just what Stardust will see in the hostile environment of deep
space......hot, cold and nothing to breathe.

We also had some great work by the Aerogel Team this week. They completed
successfully loading the aerogel tiles into the cometary side of the flight
aerogel collector. Recall that the collector is a two-layered assembly. A
thinner tray holding the aerogel to collect the interstellar particles is
attached back-to-back with the thicker tray holding the cometary aerogel
tiles. It's sort of like two ice trays in your refrigerator with the bottoms
glued together. One of course being much thinner. The team now is working
hard on getting the interstellar tray filled. Once that's done they will be
ready to ship it to Lockheed Martin in Denver.

Outreach: STARDUST Name Count: 1,149,427. This "taking of reservations" has
been extremely exciting and lots of fun. We get some great mail from folks
asking about things like "in-flight meals" and "luggage handling policies."
And we have received some poignant thoughts about the heros who fell in
Vietnam. It's an honor for us to provide honor and remembrance. Now we must
begin the process of transferring names onto the silicon chip meeting the
schedule for us all to get to the "gate" and aboard the Sample Return
Capsule. Stay tuned to the web site to keep up on how that process is done
and perhaps see some pictures of it.

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

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