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Stardust Status Report
May 9, 2003

This past week, the Stardust flight team used the antennas of JPL's
Deep Space Network on three occasions. Data relayed from the
spacecraft during that contact indicated Stardust is healthy and all
subsystems continue to run normally.

A data transfer test was successfully performed with the Cometary 
Interplanetary Dust Analyzer (CIDA) instrument.  The CIDA science
team now compresses their data prior to transferring it to be
downlinked. Also a flight software patch was developed and installed
on the spacecraft to correct a read delay parameter that was set
incorrectly.  This test verified that compressed CIDA data can be
transferred without errors. 

Two Network Simplification Plan (NSP) demonstration Deep Space
Network passes were successfully conducted at the Canberra and
Goldstone stations. 

Information on the relative positions 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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