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                    Stardust Status Report
                        March 14, 2003

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

During the Deep Space Network pass, the Stardust spacecraft 
transmitted 5 of the 32 images stored in the spacecraft's memory of 
the Pleiades star cluster. These Pleiades images were taken by 
Stardust's navigation camera and are being used to evaluate 
performance of the spacecraft camera's periscope. The image quality 
and calibration data from these images is very good. The Stardust team 
will download the remaining 27 images during an upcoming Deep Space 
Network pass on March 22.

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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