What's Up? The Space Place

Hey Space Placers! The groundbreaking STARDUST-NEXT spacecraft has finished its operational life. On March 24th at about 7 p.m. EDT, the spacecraft fired its engines until all fuel was expended. This last act will allow spacecraft engineers to know exactly how much fuel was expended during the entire lifetime of the mission and use this information to design future spacecraft and missions. This will also send the spacecraft into an uncontrolled status which means that it will not be able to keep its antenna aligned with Earth or its solar arrays aligned with the Sun. Without this two way link the spacecraft is no longer able to transmit and receive with ground controllers and it will lose power - it will be non-operational destined to roam the solar system. This spacecraft was revolutionary in its accomplishments - capturing cometary material that was returned to Earth for study as well as detailed photographs of two cometary nucleii. It has helped shape our knowledge of comets,...

Hey Space Placers, Here is the Stardust-NExT photo of the Deep Impact crater (see my earlier posts). The Stardust photo is on the right while the Deep Impact photo is on the left. The close up images detected many changes on the comet and a significant amount of erosion from the Sun's heating. The close up images will be studied in detail to document the changes. I expect we will see more in the months to come.   Sky Guy in VA

Hey Space Placers! The Stardust-NExT flyby of Comet Tempel-1 was a success and then some.  There was a glitch in the sequence of photos relayed back to Earth but that was an inconvenience, not mission affecting. This glitch did delay the news conference held and disappointed people who had stayed up on Valentine's Day evening to watch the images return to Earth. The first images were the long distance views - the closeups from the 112 mile flyby were downloaded much later - there were 72 images in all. The mission's objective was to see how much and in what way the comet had changed in the 5 years since it was imaged by the Deep Impact spacecraft in July 2005,  especially since the comet had undergone heating by the Sun during that time. With the details and clarity of the images the mission objectives were easily surpassed. The science team will be working with these images and other data for some time and our knowledge of comets will be greatly enhanced. The ...