January 29, 2003

All hardware elements are in perfect shape with no hardware anomalies of any kind being reported so far.

The spacecraft star trackers and fine sun sensor have now been powered on and we are preparing to go into normal sun pointing mode today.

We successfully powered up the instrument Microprocessor Unit (MU) and the SOLSTICE A&B instruments on 28 January and they looked great.

We are continuing to fine tune the gain, damping and limits on the Spacecraft ACS system as we optimize its on-orbit performance. This will be an ongoing activity for the next few weeks as the spacecraft commissioning continues, but overall performance is very stable and looking good.

All of the science instruments will be coming online later this week, possibly starting as soon as Thursday.