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Cornell’s CONTOUR scientists are breathing easier, but much more work lies ahead By Roger Segelken The good thing about a nighttime launch, such as the CONTOUR mission that began at 2:47 a.m. July 3 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, is the spectacular beauty of it all. Four solid-fuel boosters on the Delta II rocket blaze brightly in the Florida skies, and everyone watching – even those, remotely, in Ithaca – goes "Ooooh" and "Aaaah." The downside is that scientists intimately involved in the launch stay up all night fretting about what could go wrong, including delays such as the one that postponed the CONTOUR launch July 1.
Nevertheless, Cornell professor of astronomy Steve Squyres was wide awake and optimistic at 10 a.m. July 3 to brief Ithaca-area news media on the CONTOUR launch and what comes next. Narrating a video of the launch, Squyres relayed the anticipation experienced by the approximately 20 Department of Astronomy faculty, staff and students who witnessed the launch at the Cape and another 30 in the Space Sciences Building on campus. All the "launch criteria," including favorable weather, were met only 13 minutes before the scheduled liftoff time. The booster rockets burned for about one minute before being jettisoned from the main Delta rocket, and there was "a very long 19 minutes" until NASA ground controllers could establish communication with the spacecraft, Squyres said. "Yes, I was holding my breath a little." Now the CONTOUR spacecraft goes into a parking orbit around Earth until Aug. 15, when it will be redirected into a solar orbit and readied for its close-up comet encounters, first with Encke in November 2003 and Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 (SW3) in June 2006, and perhaps subsequently to newly discovered comets. Cornell scientists will be especially busy in the weeks before each comet encounter, but they have some easy-breathing room whenever the spacecraft is "hibernating," Squyres said. Besides worrying whether the specially designed equipment on CONTOUR will work, Squyres said, the team will share the concern of all parents with young drivers in the family – collisions. Although the craft is protected from comet particles by a sturdy shield of Nextel and Kevlar – and while Encke is an older comet with a single, relatively stable nucleus – the SW3 nucleus split apart in the mid-1990s, and a close approach could be perilous. "There is a chance we [the CONTOUR spacecraft] could be hit by a chunk of something," Squyres told news reporters. "If we’re hit by a chunk the size of a truck, the mission is over. But we will have learned something." If CONTOUR successfully
eludes comet chunks, the close approach should yield views and unprecedented
data on "fresh, new material from the nucleus of a comet," Squyres
predicted, calling comets one of the building blocks of our solar system.
"And if a ‘new’ comet is discovered in the course of
the mission," he added, "there is a high probability we can
change CONTOUR’s path and fly by." Coming up next are two more Big Red big deals, including the January 2003 launch of SIRTF (the Spacecraft Infrared Telescope Facility). Then, between May and July 2003, two rover vehicles are scheduled for launch to explore the surface of Mars. Squyres, who is the principal investigator for the Athena science package to be carried by the two rovers, expects to be holding his breath once again on Jan. 4 and Feb. 8, 2004, when the rovers are scheduled to reach the red planet. |
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