SBN Small Bodies Mission Support

Stardust-NExT Mission

Mission Description

The Stardust-NExT (New Exploration of Tempel 1) mission will use the Stardust spacecraft to flyby comet 9P/Tempel 1 on February 14, 2011, only 39 days after perihelion. The purpose of the mission is to obtain high resolution images of the coma and nucleus, as well as to measure the composition, size distribution, and flux of dust emitted into the coma. The Stardust-NExt also plans to view a significant portion of the hemisphere studied by Deep Impact (DI) in 2005 and will attempt to image the crater made by the DI impactor on July 4, 2005.

For information about the Stardust mission, the spacecraft, and and its instruments, visit the Stardust Legacy site at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Stardust data archived at the SBN are available here.

The SBN is the lead PDS node to archive the Stardust-NExT mission data. The approved NExT Data Management and Archive Plan is available as a PDF file (596 KB).

Use PDS Subscription Service to receive an e-mail notification when NExT data sets are available online at PDS.
 

Mission Home Page Instruments Mission Data Target Data

On-Board Instruments

Instrument/Investigation Measuring Small Bodies Data
available below
Navigation Camera
(NAVCAM) 		Morphology and mineralogy of the cometary nucleus none
Cometary Dust Analyzer
(CIDA) 		Composition and mass distributions of ions none
Dust Flux Monitor
(DFMI) 		Flux and size distribution of particles none
Dynamic Science Experiment
(DSE) 		High rate and small forces data due to particles the cometary environment none
Radio Science
(RS) 		Doppler tracking within the coma; Dust drag none

Mission Data

Instrument/
Investigation 		Target Available Data
(Link to Dataset Catalog Files) 		Data Link
NAVCAM Cruise Calibrations No data available yet  
9P/Tempel 1 No data available yet  
CIDA Cometary Dust No data available yet  
DFMI Cometary Dust No data available yet  
DSE Cometary Dust No data available yet  
Radio Science Dust drag on spacecraft No data available yet  
SPICE Navigation and ancillary data No data available yet  

Notes

  1. Possibly as a result of outgassing from the spacecraft during the primary Stardust mission, the Navigation Camera (NAVCAM) was contaminated by particulates deposited on the optics, thus seriously degrading the image quality in the initial observations returned by that instrument. Users should note that these data, available below, have been judged to be beyond recovery by internal and external reviewers. Fortunately, various thermal cleaning efforts brought the camera back to nearly its original performance for subsequent observations.

Other Target Observations

Target Target Type Other Data Sets Targeting this Object
9P/Tempel 1 Comet Planned, ground-based observations

Last update: 26 March 2008, McLaughlin