AASC-built Contour Satellite Launch
06/01/2002
A Boeing Delta 2 rocket has launched NASA's deep space comet explorer Contour. Launch was at 2.47am EDT (06:47 GMT).
Contour will spend the next 25 days in orbit ahead of it's deep space trajectory insertion Aug 15. Contour's first comet flyby will be Encke on Nov 12, 2003. AASC built the aft hexagonal solar array/equipment panel and all eight vertical solar array panels for our customer John Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab, (APL)
Contour is part of NASA's Discovery program and is a joint project between the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), Maryland, and Cornell University, New York. Its aim is to send a small spacecraft to examine comets Encke and Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 and bring samples back to Earth. Other participants in the $154 million project are Von Hoerner & Sulger and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.
THE CONTOUR SPACECRAFT
The design of the spacecraft is simple and has few articulated mechanisms. The solar array is body mounted and does not require drive motors. The mission geometry allows it to use fixed, passive, existing antenna designs. Other than the Contour Remote Imager Spectrograph (CRISP), all instrument and antenna pointing is controlled by moving the spacecraft. A dust shield made of Nextel and Kevlar protects against impacts for the dust sizes and densities expected at the three encounters.
What is Contour?
(Courtesy of www.contour2002.org)
The heart of a comet is the nucleus, a tiny irregular chunk of mixed-up ice and rock, often only a few miles across. If a comet approaches the Sun, the surface of the nucleus heats up, ice evaporates, and the released gases and dust form the coma, or atmosphere. So far, we've gotten close enough to see the nucleus of a comet only twice: the European Space Agency's Giotto spacecraft and NASA's Deep Space 1. The Contour Mission will fly past two comet nuclei in a few years' time. It will take pictures far better than those we have of Halley's comet. It will also collect and analyze dust to reveal the comet's make-up, in the hopes of uncovering one of science's best kept secrets, and one of man's oldest quests.
On 12 November 2003, the Contour spacecraft will visit Encke, which has the shortest orbital period of any known comet - 3.2 years to circle the sun. Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 has probably come close to the Sun less often than Encke has so it is likely that a smaller fraction of its ice has evaporated. Several large pieces split off the nucleus in 1996, and it is expected that when Contour flies by on 18 June 2006, it will probably see areas of exposed, relatively unaltered subsurface material.
Three Earth-gravity assist maneuvers will be used to achieve the two comet encounters over the three year period. The mission design is flexible enough to allow the spacecraft to visit and examine any as yet unknown comets that come close enough to the Earth. To identify suitable candidates for interception as early as possible, the Contour project will support a worldwide early warning search program for comets approaching from the fringes of the solar system.