Mission controllers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory have begun receiving the first of 72 anticipated images of comet Tempel 1 taken by NASA's Stardust spacecraft.
Credit: NASA TV
[b]Above:[/b] [i]NASA's Stardust-NExT mission transmitted the first image it took during its approach to comet Tempel 1 at 8:35 p.m. PST on Feb. 14, 2011, from a distance of approximately 2,462 kilometers (1,530 miles).[/i]
The first six, most distant approach images [URL=http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/stardust/multimedia/version1/index.html]are available[/URL] on NASA's website. Additional images, including those from closest approach, are being downlinked in chronological order and will be available later in the day.
Mission managers had originally planned to receive the images taken during Stardust-NExT's closest approach first.
"We sent the commands that we had planned, anticipating the middle five images of the 72 image sequence would be played back," explained Chris Jones, JPL's associate director for flight projects and mission success. "What we got instead, we went to the top of the stack and the first picture that we received was the first image."
"It will take about six hours at the playback rate to get us to those five images," said Jones.
A news conference previously planned for 10 a.m. PST (1 p.m. EST) will be held later in the day, to allow scientists more time to analyze the data and images.