Spacecraft Prepares for Comet Rendezvous

January 24, 2011 — Got a date for Valentine’s Day? NASA does, and it’s certainly out of this world. NASA's Stardust-NExT spacecraft is nearing a celestial date with comet Tempel 1 at approximately 11:37 p.m. EST, on February 14. The mission will allow scientists for the first time to look for changes on a comet's surface that occurred following an orbit around the sun. The Stardust-NExT, or New Exploration of Tempel, spacecraft will take high-resolution images during the encounter, and attempt to measure the composition, distribution, and flux of dust emitted into the coma, or material surrounding the comet's nucleus. Data from the mission will provide important new information on how Jupiter-family comets evolved and formed. The mission will expand the investigation of the comet initiated by NASA's Deep Impact mission. In July 2005, the Deep Impact spacecraft delivered an impactor to the comet's surface to study its composition. "Every day we are getting closer and closer and more and more excited about answering some fundamental questions about comets," said Joe Veverka, Stardust-NExT principal investigator at Cornell University. "Going back for another look at Tempel 1 will provide new insights on how comets work and how they were put together four-and-a-half billion years ago." At approximately 209 million miles away from Earth, Stardust-NExT will be almost on the exact opposite side of the solar system at the time of the encounter. During the flyby, the spacecraft will take 72 images and store them in an on board computer. Since 2007, Stardust-NExT executed eight flight path correction maneuvers, logged four circuits around the sun and used one Earth gravity assist to meet up with Tempel 1. Another three maneuvers are planned to refine the spacecraft's path to the comet. Tempel 1's orbit takes it as close in to the sun as the orbit of Mars and almost as far away as the orbit of Jupiter. The spacecraft is expected to fly past the 3.7 mile-wide comet at about 124 miles. The mission team expects this flyby to write the final chapter of the spacecraft's story. It is nearly out of fuel as it approaches 12 years of space travel, logging almost 3.7 billion miles since launch in 1999. This flyby and planned post-encounter imaging are expected to consume the remaining fuel.		Deep Impact sent a 370-kg impactor into Comet Tempel 1 in July 2005, but the resulting dust obscured its view of the newly formed crater. Credit: NASA/JPL/UMD/Pat Rawlings Arrows a and b point to large, smooth regions of Tempel 1. The impact site is indicated by the third large arrow. Small grouped arrows highlight a scarp (a cliff or steep slope along the edge of a plateau) that is bright due to illumination angle. They show a smooth area to be elevated above the extremely rough terrain. The white scale bar in the lower right represents 1 km across the surface of the comet nucleus. The two directional arrows (vectors) in the upper right point to the Sun and Celestial North. Photo Credit: NASA/UM M. F. A'Hearn et al., Science 310, 258 (2005)

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