COMET chasers in the US were last week facing up to the prospect that their $159 million spacecraft sent to visit two comets may have been destroyed. As 91av went to press, telescope observations suggested the probe, called CONTOUR, had broken in two after firing its rocket.
CONTOUR, which was launched in July this year, was due to catch up with and study the nuclei of the comets Encke and Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 (see Graphic). The spacecraft could potentially then have visited any other comets discovered in the vicinity.
But scientists running the CONTOUR project have been unable to make contact with the spacecraft since last week when they instructed its rocket motor to propel it out of Earth orbit. Mission controllers fired the spacecraft’s booster 225 kilometres above the Indian Ocean, and expected to receive a signal confirming the burn about 45 minutes later. But they heard nothing.
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It now appears the craft broke in two when the burn ended. The following day, Jeff Larsen of the University of Arizona spotted the trails of two objects on images taken by the Spacewatch Telescope on Kitt Peak near Tucson, Arizona. The trails were near where CONTOUR should have been.
“We haven’t given up, but this is pretty bad news,” said mission director Robert Farquhar of the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. One last hope is that the fainter of the two objects might be a chunk of insulation that came off the spacecraft. “We’ll grasp at any straws we can right now,” he said.
If the team hears nothing this week, it will try again in December when CONTOUR’s antennas should be pointing towards Earth.