Small Bodies Mission Support

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.
 

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

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.

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

Last update: 26 March 2008, McLaughlin