Efforts to find CONTOUR spacecraft continue

The effort to locate and contact the CONTOUR (Comet Nucleus Tour) spacecraft through telescope, radar and radio checks continues, according to NASA. The spacecraft disappeared on Aug. 15 after its main rocket engine was scheduled to fire.

Aided by an Aug. 16 telescope image from the Spacewatch Project at the University of Arizona showing two objects along a path close to CONTOUR's predicted trajectory, mission operators know where to look now, says Robert Farquhar, CONTOUR director from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, which is managing the mission for NASA.

Beginning today (Aug. 19), the mission team plans to check if CONTOUR carries out a timed command to cycle and will attempt to transmit through different antennas. The sequence is timed to start 96 hours after CONTOUR receives its last command, meaning it could have started as early as 4:09 a.m. (EDT) or as late as 10:09 p.m. today and would last several hours. The search is being carried out by NASA's Deep Space Network and the Arecibo Observatory.

"We aren't sure that the spacecraft is completely gone, and that's what were going to be working on over the next several days," Farquhar says.

Cornell University is leading the science team for the $159 million mission, intended to pass close to the nuclei of at least two comets. The spacecraft has been orbiting Earth since it was launched on July 3.

For up-to-date information, go to the CONTOUR home page at http://www.contour2002.org.