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Karen Meech |
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"Small Body Space Missions - New Insights into Comets" |
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This talk will discuss some recent issues from related to three comet missions: The EPOXI Mission - On July 4, 2005 the Deep Impact mission successfully sent an impactor into the surface of comet 9P/Tempel 1. One of the mission goals that was not accomplished was to image the crater that was created by the impact. This was because there was so much dust remaining post impact that it did not clear out during the 15 min allocated for the flyby spacecraft. The flyby spacecraft has been approved for an extended mission to another comet, 103P/Hartley 2, and it will have its encounter on November 4, 2010. We will discuss the world observing plans for this event. The StardustNExT Mission - Meanwhile, the Stardust parent spacecraft was also available for an extended mission, and a mission was approved that would take the space craft back to comet Tempel 1 to image the crater and look at the changes that will have occurred on the surface between two perihelion passages. The StardustNExT team faced a significant challenge, namely that we had to arrive at the comet for the flyby at a time when the crater would be visible. The comet rotates once roughly every 41 hours and the last time we could affect a change in our arrival time is early February 2010 - one year before encounter on 2/14/2011. We will present the challenges we faced, and show the results of a massive international observing campaign, and will highlight some surprising new information that we learned about comet rotation dynamics, and the correction to the arrival time that we made at the last trajectory correction maneuver. Proteus - A Mission to Explore a Main Belt Comet - While flybys such as Deep Impact, StardustNExT and EPOXI have given us a new deep understanding of comet physics, the next generation of missions represented by the Rosetta mission, will be in-situ rendezvous missions that will watch the development of comet activity over months. We will discuss our plans for a new Discovery class mission to a new class of comet which may hold clues to volatile distribution in the early solar system. |