Members of the NASA Contour mission team from Cornell -- from left, astronomy Professor Joseph Veverka and senior research associates in astronomy Peter Thomas and James Bell -- in front of a comet display in the Space Sciences Building. The fourth member of the team is astronomy Professor Steven W. Squyres. Denise Weldon/University Photography
Cornell will lead and direct a $154 million mission to conduct close-proximity comet fly-bys, scheduled for launch early in the next century. The award, announced by NASA Oct. 21, is the largest single mission grant in the university's 129-year history.
The Comet Nucleus Tour mission -- nicknamed Contour -- will be led by Joseph Veverka, Cornell professor of astronomy. The unmanned mission will take images and comparative spectral maps of at least three comet nuclei and analyze the dust and gas flowing from them. The mission's goals are to dramatically improve knowledge of the key characteristics of comet nuclei and to assess their diversity.
"Comets are the most important pieces in the solar system and maybe the least understood," said Veverka, explaining that comets hold many secrets to the origins of the universe and of life itself. "And given our proximity to the comets, we will be able to obtain the best images of comets ever taken. Our images will be high resolution, yielding a great deal of information."
NASA said the mission is scheduled for launch in July 2002 -- aboard a Delta rocket -- with its first comet fly-by occurring in November 2003. The Contour spacecraft will be outfitted with a solar array for power, two cameras, a mass spectrometer to study the gas, a dust analyzer, light spectrometers and a high-gain antenna for communication with Earth. The spacecraft will be assembled at the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University.
Both cameras -- one to take photos of a large portion of the sky surrounding the comet and one with a narrow view -- also are being built at the Johns Hopkins laboratory, as is a combined visible light and infra-red spectrometer. The mass spectrometer is being built at the NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and the University of Heidelberg, Germany, will assemble the dust impact analyzer.
Veverka expects these instruments to be finished by late 1999. Once done, the Applied Physics Laboratory will then assemble the scientific instruments into the entire spacecraft package in 2000. By 2001, the finished spacecraft will be ready for testing and a year later will be ready for launch.
As principal investigator, Veverka said Contour will venture and meet the comets about 30 million miles from Earth during its mission. On its initial fly-by, the spacecraft will visit comet Encke in 2003. Its next fly-by will be of comet Schwassmann-Wachmann-3 in June 2006 and its third close encounter will be with comet d'Arrest in August 2008.
Joining Veverka on Cornell's mission team are Steven W. Squyres, Cornell professor of astronomy; and James Bell and Peter C. Thomas, senior research associates in the Cornell Astronomy Department's Center for Radiophysics and Space Research.
Squyres will serve as the deputy primary investigator on the project. The team will use Bell's expertise with image spectroscopy and Thomas' on mapping irregularly shaped objects.
The team is considered small by previous NASA standards, in order to keep it nimble and the projects costs down, according to Veverka. Other Contour team members are from Johns Hopkins University, NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, University of Hawaii, University of Texas, the Space Telescope Science Institute, National Optical Astronomical Observatories, European Space Agency, Malin Space Science Systems Inc., DLR (Deutsche Forschungsanstalt für Luft und Raumfahrt e.V.), Lockheed Martin, and the Max Planck Institute.
While Cornell has received larger amounts of funding for direct projects, such as the Arecibo telescope facility in Puerto Rico and the Cornell Theory Center, this grant is the largest at Cornell for a single mission, according to Jack Lowe, associate vice president of research and director of Cornell Sponsored Programs.
NASA also announced a second Discovery program project last week, in which California Institute of Technology will lead the Genesis mission, a $216 million project, which will be launched in January 2001 to collect samples of charged particles for study of the solar wind.
The two awards announced last week were among 34 proposals submitted during the second round of the Discovery program proposals to NASA in December 1996, and are part of NASA's Discovery Program, which delivers extensive scientific research for lower costs.
Last spring, Veverka learned that his research team made the semi-final round. NASA then asked Veverka's team to submit a more-detailed proposal, which the team presented in a briefing for NASA officials in September.
Contour and Genesis follow four previously selected NASA Discovery missions. The Mars Pathfinder lander, carrying the rover Sojourner, landed successfully July 4 on Mars and returned spectacular images and information on the Martian environment. The Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) returned sharp images of the asteroid Mathilde in June of this year, and will spend one year orbiting its primary target, asteroid 433 Eros, in 1999. Cornell astronomy faculty were represented on both of those missions.
NASA's Lunar Prospector orbiter mission to map the moon's composition and gravity field is scheduled for launch next January, and the Stardust mission is scheduled for a February 1999 launch to gather dust from Comet Wild-2 in 2004 and return it to Earth. Cornell faculty are not directly involved with these missions.
"This is exceptional science and cost-efficient," said Bell, who participated in imaging with the Mars Pathfinder mission. "We're all going to learn a lot about comets. Anytime you study objects in such great detail, this is absolute exploration."
The Department of Astronomy held an impromptu champagne lunch in the Space Sciences building last week when it heard about the awarding of the mission grant.
President Hunter Rawlings also expressed his congratulations to the team: "The Contour project led by Cornell will be one of the first important space missions launched in the next century. I congratulate Joe Veverka and his science team as they embark on this exciting intellectual enterprise."
"We think that there are millions of comets inhabiting the environs of the solar system, and studying the composition of comets will tell us something about the beginnings of the solar system," said Yervant Terzian, the James A. Weeks Professor of Physical Sciences and chair of the Department of Astronomy, prior to the celebration.
For Veverka, the announcement was the culmination of years of work. "I guess you could say it has been two decades since I became involved with this," he said.
Bell explained: "Joe has been a major player in planetary exploration, he's worked hard to get to this point. NASA really trusts him. For him to lead a $154 million mission really says something about how much they trust him."
Years before the 1986 appearance of comet Halley, Veverka had proposed sending a research spacecraft to study one of history's most renowned comets. During the Carter administration, NASA had planned a fly-by of comet Halley, in which Veverka would have participated, but budget-tightening doomed the project in 1979. A year later, NASA went back to Congress and sought approval for sending an American-built spacecraft -- proposed for $250 million -- through Halley's gaseous head and tail. That project was never funded.
While European and Japanese astronomers gathered data from the Halley fly-by in 1986, the Americans were scientifically stranded. Almost two decades after Veverka set out to study comets in close proximity, he now has his chance, and he believes the research will yield cascades of information about us, our universe and how humanity developed.
"This project has been a big effort," said Veverka. "Now the fun part begins -- we start doing the science."