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Stardust Update - 10/17/97
I've asked Ken Atkins, the STARDUST project manager, to provide frequent status
reports which will be made available on the STARDUST home page. This is the
first report, which will be issued at least every 2 weeks. Normally, you
don't hear too much on the progress of a flight project prior to its launch,
but we plan to do things differently for the STARDUST mission.
Ron Baalke
STARDUST Outreach
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STARDUST Status Report
October 17, 1997
Ken Atkins
STARDUST Project Manager
Welcome to the first Webpage Weekly Report. It is our hope to raise our
STARDUST fans' interest and involvement by communicating some of the
exciting progress and events on the project as we proceed toward our
rendezvous with the Delta Rocket and blast-off toward Wild 2. Since this is
the first report it is most appropriate to attempt initiating the reader at
a start point. So, let's begin a little review.
Hopefully, you already know STARDUST was selected competitively from a field
of 28 proposals as the winner of the #5 position in NASA's Discovery
Program. The Discovery Program is NASA's series of relatively low-cost
robotic missions aimed at doing planetary exploration faster, better and
cheaper. After selection, the project team entered an intensive preliminary
design phase (a.k.a. Phase B in the jargon). This period of about a year
took us from November 1995 to September 1996. At that time a Preliminary
Design Review (PDR) was held by NASA to validate the mission and spacecraft
design maturity, match it with the Discovery budget constraints and decide
whether the project was ready to proceed to the detail design and
development phases (a.k.a. Phase C/D). We passed.
So for last year, from October 1996 to now, the team has been very busy
completing hardware designs for the spacecraft components, buying or
building those components, and also working on the software programs that
will test it on the ground and operate it in flight. As the hardware and
software are built they are then integrated and tested to be sure they work
together as a team. So preliminary testing has been an important activity
this year as well.
Some of the key elements include the Aerogel collector that will go into the
Sample Return Capsule to capture the comet and interstellar particles, the
flight computers, the heat shields, the spacecraft particle shields, the
cameras, radios, solar power system, propulsion, and the structures,
mechanisms, and electronics that hook everything together. It's a pretty
complex task involving about 200 engineers at Lockheed-Martin's Astronautics
Co. in Denver, some 35 engineers at JPL, and about 15 U.S. mission
scientists scattered around the country at universities and laboratories.
That's not counting the Boeing Co. folks that are working to get our launch
rocket ready and the folks in Germany building one of the "passenger"
instruments, the Cometary and Interstellar Dust Analyzer (CIDA), described
elsewhere on this website in more detail.
At this point in the project, we have completed virtually all the design
work, have passed the so-called Critical Design Review (CDR) and are moving
quickly toward the time when we begin to assemble, integrate and test
everything working together as a full flight system. So in the weeks ahead
you'll read about the accomplishments and challenges as we bring
qualification units into the assembly and test environments in Denver. Soon
we will have cameras on this website showing continuous time-lapse "stills"
of the daily assembly processes as the project team brings the spacecraft
toward its readiness to ship to Cape Canaveral for launch.
In this report, we will be sharing some of the details on that activity as
it happens. You can be a participant by following our weekly or bi-weekly
updates. So we begin here with some notes from our last two "weekly" reports
that we send to our colleagues on the project and at NASA. And again,
Welcome Aboard!
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Aerogel Production update: 30 quartz molds for making cometary collector
aerogel were received this week. These were of good form and the dimensions
met the specifications. This indicates that the vendor is able to supply the
needed mold size. These will be used next week along with the
already-in-hand interstellar particle collector quartz molds to make a
"pre-qual" production run of Aerogel in preparation for producing the
qualification units for delivery to Lockheed-Martin Astronautics (LMA)
during the first week in November. If successful, this will complete the
qualification tests before Thanksgiving.
Cometary & Interstellar Dust Analyzer (CIDA) Working Meeting (Germany Sept
29 to Oct 1): The trip report showed good accomplishments in command and
telemetry agreements. Also a number of software issues were resolved such as
instrument startup and code files. Unfortunately the schedule mismatch on
Assembly Test & Launch Operations (ATLO) delivery date was not resolved.
Both ATLO team and the CIDA team are examining additional work-around
options.
The Launch Vehicle Ground Ops Working Group met at Kennedy Space Center
(KSC) on 10/7 & 8. Focus items included change of the spacecraft processing
facility, communications plans, and safety procedures.
The spacecraft flight structure was disassembled in preparation for final
installation of the thermal insulation and Nextel particle curtains in the
Whipple shields. The Whipple shield composite structure details were
completed and enough stand-off tubes were shipped by Spyrotech to assemble
the Structural Thermal Model.
A "lessons-learned" session with Giotto (The European Space Agency's probe
of Halley's comet in the 80's) personnel was held in Germany. Discussions on
the health and history of Giotto showed very strongly that the STARDUST
spacecraft design would have survived the Halley encounter. The Giotto
fly-through speed at Halley was over 70 km/s.....an order of magnitude
higher than the plan for STARDUST at Wild-2.
The 'Bill Nye the Science Guy' PBS TV production team did a STARDUST "shoot"
at LMA Thursday, 10/9. Airing should be in November. Denver TV Channel 4
also interviewed LMA personnel on Monday, 10/6.
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/