[meteorite-list] NASA's Venerable Comet Hunter Wraps Up Mission (Stardust)

From: Michael Gilmer <meteoritemike_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Fri, 25 Mar 2011 12:02:01 -0400
Message-ID: <AANLkTi=Ue332HbvaduWOR+C8UWSkciCK7Lx5r0E+rYqo_at_mail.gmail.com>

Hi Ron and List,

It's sad to the see the old girl go. On it's current course, where
will the craft go? I am assuming out of the solar system and into
interstellar space, but will it head towards a specific star or just
out into "empty" space?

Best regards,

MikeG

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On 3/25/11, Ron Baalke <baalke at zagami.jpl.nasa.gov> wrote:
>
> http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2011-095
>
> NASA's Venerable Comet Hunter Wraps Up Mission
> Jet Propulsion Laboratory
> March 24, 2011
>
> At 33 minutes after 4 p.m. PDT today, NASA's Stardust spacecraft
> finished its last transmission to Earth. The transmission came on the
> heels of the venerable spacecraft's final rocket burn, which was
> designed to provide insight into how much fuel remained aboard after its
> encounter with comet Tempel 1 in February.
>
> "Stardust has been teaching us about our solar system since it was
> launched in 1999," said Stardust-NExT project manager Tim Larson from
> NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "It makes sense
> that its very last moments would be providing us with data we can use to
> plan deep space mission operations in the future."
>
> The burn to depletion maneuver was designed to fire Stardust's rockets
> until insufficient fuel remains to continue, all the while downlinking
> data on the burn to Earth some 312 million kilometers (194 million
> miles) away. Mission personnel will compare the amount of fuel consumed
> in the burn with the amount they anticipated would be burned based on
> their fuel consumption models.
>
> Fuel consumption models are necessary because no one has invented a
> reliable fuel gauge for spacecraft when in the weightless environment of
> space flight. Until that day arrives, mission planners can approximate
> fuel usage by looking at the history of the vehicle's flight and how
> many times and for how long its rocket motors have fired.
>
> Mission personnel watched the final data from the burn come down at
> JPL's Space Flight Operations Facility and at the Stardust-NExT mission
> support center at Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver.
>
> "Stardust motors burned for 146 seconds," said Allan Cheuvront, Lockheed
> Martin Space Systems Company program manager for Stardust-NExT. "We'll
> crunch the numbers and see how close the reality matches up with our
> projections. That will be a great data set to have in our back pocket
> when we plan for future missions."
>
> The Stardust team performed the final burn to depletion because NASA's
> most senior comet hunter is a spacecraft literally running on fumes.
> Launched on Feb. 7, 1999, Stardust had completed its prime mission back
> in January 2006. By that time, Stardust had already flown past an
> asteroid (Annefrank), flown halfway out to Jupiter to collect particle
> samples from the coma of a comet, Wild 2, and returned to fly by Earth
> to drop off a sample return capsule eagerly awaited by comet scientists.
> NASA then re-tasked the spacecraft to perform a bonus mission to fly
> past comet Tempel 1 to collect images and other scientific data.
> Stardust has traveled about 21 million kilometers (13 million miles) in
> its journey about the sun in the few weeks since the Valentine's day
> comet Tempel 1 flyby, making the grand total from launch to its final
> rocket burn about 5.69 billion kilometers (3.54 billion miles).
>
> With all that mileage logged, the Stardust team knew the end was near.
> Now, with its fuel tank empty and its final messages transmitted,
> history's most traveled comet hunter will move from NASA's active
> mission roster to retired.
>
> "This kind of feels like the end of one of those old Western movies
> where you watch the hero ride his horse towards the distant setting sun
> - and then the credits begin to roll," said Larson. "Only there's no
> setting sun in space."
>
> Stardust-NExT was a low-cost mission to expand the investigation of
> comet Tempel 1 initiated by NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft. JPL, a
> division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, managed
> the Stardust-NExT project for the NASA Science Mission Directorate,
> Washington, D.C., which was part of the Discovery Program managed by
> NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. Joe Veverka of
> Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., was the mission's principal
> investigator. Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, built the
> spacecraft and managed day-to-day mission operations.
>
> For more information about Stardust-NExT, please visit:
> http://stardustnext.jpl.nasa.gov.
>
> DC Agle 818-393-9011
> Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
> agle at jpl.nasa.gov
>
> 2011-095
>
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--

Received on Fri 25 Mar 2011 12:02:01 PM PDT