Faithful readers know that the little craft has been traveling through space without the benefit of one of its primary sensors.

The star tracker, so memorably named in honor of its function of tracking stars, stopped working in November, but the operations team devised remarkable new ways of controlling the craft, described in song and story as well as recent mission logs.

And now the team is going to attempt to upgrade Deep Space 1 so that it can do even more -- and do it with much less direct supervision from far-away Earth.

This is NASA at its best.

In its triumphant and exciting primary mission, which concluded in September, Deep Space 1 met or exceeded all of its "mission success criteria."

But JPL and NASA decided to squeeze as much out of the mission as possible, so DS1 was allowed to continue operating. Later, when its star tracker stopped, by all rights the mission should have been over.

All spacecraft (all machines, for that matter) reach the end of their operating lives sooner or later, usually triggered by some critical component failing.

With an enviable record of accomplishments behind it, DS1 could have been retired to rest on its many laurels.

But engineers saw a hope for rejuvenating the distant craft to allow it to continue its solar system journey.

By redesigning it with new computer programs, the team has developed a method to have the camera replace the star tracker.

There are many differences between the star tracker and the camera.

Among them is the amount of sky they view, an important difference which you terrestrial listeners may be able to visualize.

The camera sees an area only a bit larger than the full moon as viewed from Earth, but the star tracker covered well over 100 times as much area.

Both can see stars fainter than the unaided human eye can detect, but the next time you enjoy the beautiful sights of your nighttime sky, imagine being able to search for stars in a patch of sky only as large as the moon instead of one comparable in size to the bowl of the Big Dipper.

The star tracker told the spacecraft computer its orientation in space, based on the patterns of stars it saw, and it did so 4 times every second.

The camera, on the other hand, simply produces a computer file containing a picture, and it takes more than 20 seconds to transfer one picture to the computer.

Then the picture has to be analyzed.