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Stardust Status Report
April 14, 2003

As the Stardust spacecraft passed into a 'solar conjunction period'
on April 3, and there is currently no communication between the
spacecraft and the Stardust team here on terra firma. Solar
conjunction period is the interval that the Sun obscures the line of
sight between Earth and the spacecraft, making it virtually
impossible to transmit radio signals between the two. The last data
relayed from the spacecraft prior to conjunction indicated that the
spacecraft was healthy and all subsystems continue to operate
normally. The Stardust team is confident that will remain the case
when they reestablish communications sometime after the end of solar
conjunction on April 18. 

The Stardust team held a science workshop on April 3 and 4 at Cal
Tech. Issues covered ran the gamut from the expected dust environment
around Comet Wild 2 to the media plan for encounter.

The Pasadena Art Center recently made a three-dimensional image of
the brain. While artistic interpretations of the gray matter are
somewhat unusual enough what warrants its inclusion here is the
media in which it was depicted. The Art Center created this work of
art utilizing an etching/laser process in aerogel provided by the
STARDUST Technology Transfer team . The image can be seen on the
cover of Nature Neuroscience and at http://www.nature.com/nrn.

Information on the present position and orbits of the Stardust
spacecraft and comet Wild 2 may be found on the "Where Is Stardust
Right Now?" web page located at:

http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/scnow.html

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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