Stardust-NExT, Revisiting Tempel 1 Options

[Paolo]

I thought it was time to start a new thread on Stardust's flyby of Tempel 1, the first time a comet receives a second visit from a spacecraft one perihelion later.
There was an interesting story about this on Spaceflight now recently http://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n1012/23stardustnext/
note that the flyby will be around 23.30 eastern time on 14 February, so thinking in GMT it will not happen on Valentine's day.
Stardust should have started imaging Tempel 1 twice weekly in mid-December, but there is nothing yet on the mission site http://stardustnext.jpl.nasa.gov/index.html
see also http://stardustnext.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/m...tatus10_q4.html for updates on the mission status

[djellison]

I've heard that someone might be demoing it live, twice, on the first NASA TV broadcast tomorrow evening, and that there might be a frickin great big camera on top of his console staring him in the face.

(and if I do say so myself, the C/A looks really awesome in EotSS - took some work by a very very clever programmer called Jon to get the camera to flip from periscope to off periscope. He's actually programmed the spacecraft to do faux-auto-nav based on the provided trajecgories for Stardust and Tempel 1. Plus - our 3D guy, haivng produced a BEAUTIFUL Stardust spacecraft, went and created a brailliant Tempel 1 complete with stuff seen by Deep Impact ( grey ) stuff not seen ( blue ) and the hoped-for crater ( red target )

If I do say so myself, it's fairly cool.

Oh and don't - whatever you do - look at the tutorials page.

[ElkGroveDan]

Don't have any chocolate the night before. Never fails the day you are going to be on television ...