Fwd: Comet-Hunting Deep Impact Mission Comes to an End

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From: "Gary Johnson" <gjohnson144@comcast.net>
Date: September 21, 2013 9:54:22 AM GMT-06:00
To: "Gary Johnson" <gjohnson144@comcast.net>
Subject: FW: Comet-Hunting Deep Impact Mission Comes to an End

NASA's Deep Space Comet Hunter Mission Comes to an End

September 20, 2013

 

PASADENA, Calif. - After almost 9 years in space that included an unprecedented July 4th impact and subsequent flyby of a comet, an additional comet flyby, and the return of approximately 500,000 images of celestial objects, NASA's Deep Impact mission has ended.

 

The project team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., has reluctantly pronounced the mission at an end after being unable to communicate with the spacecraft for over a month. The last communication with the probe was Aug. 8. Deep Impact was history's most traveled comet research mission, going about 4.7 billion miles (7.58 billion kilometers).

 

"Deep Impact has been a fantastic, long-lasting spacecraft that has produced far more data than we had planned," said Mike A'Hearn, the Deep Impact principal investigator at the University of Maryland in College Park. "It has revolutionized our understanding of comets and their activity."

 

Deep Impact successfully completed its original bold mission of six months in 2005 to investigate both the surface and interior composition of a comet, and a subsequent extended mission of another comet flyby and observations of planets around other stars that lasted from July 2007 to December 2010. Since then, the spacecraft has been continually used as a space-borne planetary observatory to capture images and other scientific data on several targets of opportunity with its telescopes and instrumentation.

 

Launched in January 2005, the spacecraft first traveled about 268 million miles (431 million kilometers) to the vicinity of comet Tempel 1. On July 3, 2005, the spacecraft deployed an impactor into the path of comet to essentially be run over by its nucleus on July 4. This caused material from below the comet's surface to be blasted out into space where it could be examined by the telescopes and instrumentation of the flyby spacecraft. Sixteen days after that comet encounter, the Deep Impact team placed the spacecraft on a trajectory to fly back past Earth in late December 2007 to put it on course to encounter another comet, Hartley 2 in November 2010.

 

"Six months after launch, this spacecraft had already completed its planned mission to study comet Tempel 1," said Tim Larson, project manager of Deep Impact at JPL. "But the science team kept finding interesting things to do, and through the ingenuity of our mission team and navigators and support of NASA's Discovery Program, this spacecraft kept it up for more than eight years, producing amazing results all along the way."

 

The spacecraft's extended mission culminated in the successful flyby of comet Hartley 2 on Nov. 4, 2010. Along the way, it also observed six different stars to confirm the motion of planets orbiting them, and took images and data of Earth, the moon and Mars. These data helped to confirm the existence of water on the moon, and attempted to confirm the methane signature in the atmosphere of Mars. One sequence of images is a breathtaking view of the moon transiting across the face of Earth.

 

In January 2012, Deep Impact performed imaging and accessed the composition of distant comet C/2009 P1 (Garradd). It took images of comet ISON this year and collected early images of ISON in June.

 

After losing contact with the spacecraft last month, mission controllers spent several weeks trying to uplink commands to reactivate its onboard systems. Although the exact cause of the loss is not known, analysis has uncovered a potential problem with computer time tagging that could have led to loss of control for Deep Impact's orientation. That would then affect the positioning of its radio antennas, making communication difficult, as well as its solar arrays, which would in turn prevent the spacecraft from getting power and allow cold temperatures to ruin onboard equipment, essentially freezing its battery and propulsion systems.

 

"Despite this unexpected final curtain call, Deep Impact already achieved much more than ever was envisioned," said Lindley Johnson, the Discovery Program Executive at NASA Headquarters, and the Program Executive for the mission since a year before it launched. "Deep Impact has completely overturned what we thought we knew about comets and also provided a treasure trove of additional planetary science that will be the source data of research for years to come."

 

The mission is part of the Discovery Program managed at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. JPL manages the Deep Impact mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. of Boulder, Colo., built the spacecraft. The California Institute of Technology in Pasadena manages JPL for NASA.

 

To find out more about Deep Impact's scientific results, visit:

 

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-286

 

For more information about Deep Impact, visit:

 

http://www.nasa.gov/deepimpact

 

D.C. Agle 818-393-9011

Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

agle@jpl.nasa.gov

 

Dwayne Brown 202-358-1726

NASA Headquarters, Washington

dwayne.c.brown@nasa.gov

 

Lee Tune 301-405-4679 

University of Maryland, 

College Park, Md. 

ltune@umd.edu

 

2013-287

 

 

NASA's Comet-Hunting Deep Impact Probe Is Dead In Space

By Mike Wall, Senior Writer   |   September 20, 2013 12:17pm ET

 

NASA's veteran Deep Impact spacecraft has chased its last comet.

 

The space agency declared Deep Impact dead today (Sept. 20), six weeks after the last communication from the probe, which slammed an impactor into one comet and successfully flew by another icy wanderer during its long and productive life.

 

"Deep Impact has been a fantastic, long-lasting spacecraft that has produced far more data than we had planned," Deep Impact principal investigator Mike A'Hearn, of the University of Maryland, said in a statement. "It has revolutionized our understanding of comets and their activity." [Best Close Encounters of the Comet Kind]

 

Deep Impact launched in January 2005 on a mission to rendezvous with Comet Tempel 1. In July of that year, the spacecraft crashed an impactor into Tempel 1, allowing scientists to study the icy body's composition.

 

Deep Impact then flew by Comet Hartley 2 in November 2010, as part of a broad extended mission dubbed EPOXI (a combination of "Extrasolar Planet Observation and Characterization" and "Deep Impact Extended Investigation").

 

The spacecraft also observed Comet Garradd from afar from February-April 2012, then snapped its first photos of the potentially dazzling Comet ISON in January of this year. In addition, Deep Impact captured images of Earth, Mars and the moon and studied six separate stars to confirm the motions of their orbiting planets, NASA officials said.

 

Over the course of its operational life, the spacecraft beamed home about 500,000 images and traveled 4.7 billion miles (7.58 billion kilometers) through deep space.

 

"Six months after launch, this spacecraft had already completed its planned mission to study Comet Tempel 1," said Deep Impact project manager Tim Larson, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "But the science team kept finding interesting things to do, and through the ingenuity of our mission team and navigators and support of NASA's Discovery Program, this spacecraft kept it up for more than eight years, producing amazing results all along the way."

 

Mission controllers last heard from Deep Impact on Aug. 8 of this year, and repeated attempts to reactivate its onboard systems were unsuccessful. The exact cause of the problem remains unknown, but the probe's handlers suspect that an issue with computer time-tagging caused Deep Impact to lose control of its orientation in space.

 

As a result, the probe likely had trouble positioning its radio antennas and solar arrays, making both communication and power generation difficult. Without sufficient power, Deep Impact's battery and propulsion systems may have frozen up in the frigid depths of space, NASA officials said.

 

"Despite this unexpected final curtain call, Deep Impact already achieved much more than ever was envisioned," said Lindley Johnson, the Discovery Program Executive at NASA Headquarters, and the longtime program executive for the spacecraft's mission. "Deep Impact has completely overturned what we thought we knew about comets and also provided a treasure trove of additional planetary science that will be the source data of research for years to come."

 

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