Spacecraft has Valentine's date with comet

Wed, 19 Jan 2011

Washington - An unmanned spacecraft has a Valentine's Day date with a comet, in the second such close encounter by a NASA craft in recent months.

The Stardust-NEXT spacecraft will pass within 200 kilometers of the comet Tempel 1 to give scientists their first look at the changes on a comet's surface after it has made an orbit around the sun.

They will compare photos taken during the fly-by to images captured in 2005 by the Deep Impact spacecraft. That mission involved crashing a part of a spacecraft into the comet to look at its internal composition.

"We want to see more about the area Deep Impact already discovered in 2005," principal investigator Joe Veverka told reporters. "The most important reason is: How much a comet changes. We will be looking for changes and new territories."

Scientists hope to use data to measure the composition and amount of dust being sent off by the comet's nucleus because such information will provide information about how comets evolve and were formed millions of years ago.

In November, NASA conducted another close fly-by of a comet, known as Hartley 2, snapping high-resolution images of the comet's nucleus.

Composed of ice, dust and gases, comets offer windows on the formation of the solar system, because they are believed to be leftover building blocks of the early solar system that may have brought water and other organic compounds to Earth.

The Stardust mission has been underway since 1999 and has already visited comet Wild 2. This is to be its final task.

Source: Earth Times.
Link: http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/news/363204,spacecraft-valentines-date-comet.html.