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Dwayne Brown 202-358-1726
Headquarters, Washington
Dwayne.c.brown@nasa.gov
DC Agle 818-393-9011
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
agle@jpl.nasa.gov
News Release: 2011-019 Jan. 19, 2011
NASA Spacecraft Prepares for Valentine's Day Comet Rendezvous
The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2011-019&cid=release_2011-019
PASADENA, Calif., -- NASA's Stardust-NExT spacecraft is nearing a celestial date with
comet Tempel 1 at approximately 8:37 p.m. PST (11:37 p.m. EST), on Feb. 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 surface of
Tempel 1 to study its composition. The Stardust spacecraft may capture an image of the
crater created by the impactor. This would be an added bonus to the huge amount of data
that mission scientists expect to obtain.
"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, Ithaca, N.Y. "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 336 million kilometers (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
onboard computer.
Initial raw images from the flyby will be sent to Earth for processing that will begin at
approximately midnight PST (3 a.m. EST) on Feb. 15. Images are expected to be available
at approximately 1:30 a.m. PST (4:30 a.m. EST).
As of today, the spacecraft is approximately 24.6 million kilometers (15.3 million miles)
away from its encounter. 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 nearly 6-kilometer-wide comet
(3.7 miles) at a distance of approximately 200 kilometers (124 miles).
In 2004, the Stardust mission became the first to collect particles directly from comet
Wild 2, as well as interstellar dust. Samples were returned in 2006 for study via a capsule
that detached from the spacecraft and parachuted to the ground southwest of Salt Lake
City. Mission controllers placed the still viable Stardust spacecraft on a trajectory that
could potentially reuse the flight system if a target of opportunity presented itself.
In January 2007, NASA re-christened the mission Stardust-NExT and began a four-and-
a-half year journey to comet Tempel 1.
"You could say our spacecraft is a seasoned veteran of cometary campaigns," said Tim
Larson, project manager for Stardust-NExT at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in
Pasadena, Calif. "It's been half-way to Jupiter, executed picture-perfect flybys of an
asteroid and a comet, collected cometary material for return to Earth, then headed back
out into the void again, where we asked it to go head-to-head with a second comet
nucleus."
The mission team expects this flyby to write the final chapter of the spacecraft's success-
filled story. The spacecraft is nearly out of fuel as it approaches 12 years of space travel,
logging almost 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles) since launch in 1999. This flyby and
planned post-encounter imaging are expected to consume the remaining fuel.
JPL manages the mission for the agency's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.
Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver built the spacecraft and manages day-to-day
mission operations. JPL is managed by the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena.
For more information about the Stardust-NExT mission, visit:
http://stardustnext.jpl.nasa.gov/
-end-
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