CU-led science team readies for NASA comet mission launch, July 1

By Blaine P. Friedlander Jr.

"Up, up and away" is the song that Cornell researchers are hoping they will be singing in the early hours of a Florida pre-dawn when NASA's Comet Nucleus Tour (CONTOUR) mission lifts off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station aboard a three-stage Boeing Delta II expendable launch vehicle. The spacecraft will carry with it the hopes of Cornell astronomer Joseph Veverka and his international science team.

Reporters Rebecca James, left, from the Syracuse Post-Standard, and Esther Campi, from the Ithaca Journal, take notes in the Space Sciences Building while Cornell Professor Joseph Veverka speaks, via satellite, during a NASA briefing on the CONTOUR mission, June 12. Frank DiMeo/University Photography

The mission liftoff -- the first 6-second launch "window" over 25 days is at 2:56 a.m. July 1 -- will be attended by several hundred people, including more than 400 from Cornell, among them President Hunter Rawlings and other members of the Cornell administration, as well as university trustees, faculty, staff, alumni and friends. The group will be presented with a thorough background on the launch and the mission by the CONTOUR science team, whose Cornell members also include astronomers Peter Thomas, Jim Bell and Steven Squyres. And if all goes well, the large group will celebrate at a champagne breakfast at 4:30 in the morning.

The $159 million CONTOUR mission will take a spacecraft closer to the icy, rocky heart of a comet, its nucleus, than ever before. Starting with Comet Encke on Nov. 12, 2003, the spacecraft will study at least two comets, providing the first detailed look at the differences between these primitive building blocks of the solar system, as well as answer questions about how comets act and evolve. After launch, the spacecraft, carrying four scientific instruments, will orbit the Earth until Aug. 15, after which its main engine should fire and take the craft into a comet-chasing orbit around the sun.

The eight-sided, solar-powered craft will fly as close as 100 kilometers (62 miles) to each comet nucleus, at speeds that will be the equivalent of covering the 56 kilometers from Washington to Baltimore in two seconds.

"Comets are the most abundant and least-understood bodies in our solar system," said Veverka, professor and chair of the astronomy department, who is the mission's principal scientific investigator and leader of the 25-person scientific team. Speaking at a prelaunch briefing June 12 at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C., which was broadcast via satellite over NASA TV, Veverka said: "[Comets] are important because they are the best-preserved pieces of the solid materials out of which the planets formed 4.6 billion years ago."

Veverka explained that mission scientists are asking fundamental questions about how comets work and what they mean to humanity. "We want to know what the diversity, chemically, is among the comets. The reason we want to know that is to address some important questions, not only concerning comets themselves, but concerning the early history of the Earth and the role that comets may have played in it," he said.

Some specific questions this mission could answer include: Did the water from our lakes, rivers and oceans arrive via comet? Was our air delivered by comet? Did the molecules brought by comets induce life on Earth?

"These are questions really about the chemistry of our Earth and questions about us," said Veverka.

The plan is to take data throughout the comet flyby, said Veverka, but the craft's four scientific instruments will have to act fast.

"Most of the high-resolution images occur very quickly, within less than a minute to closest approach," he said. "The reason, of course, is that the flyby speed is almost 30 kilometers per second, which, in normal terms, I think is about 55 thousand miles an hour. So we have to do things very quickly."