The $159 million Comet Nucleus Tour (Contour) spacecraft, which NASA launched in June to rendezvous with three comets, apparently broke into pieces in August. “There was a big problem with firing the solid rocket booster,” says Robert Farquhar, mission director at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL).
Contour spent two months in a highly elliptical orbit before attempting to leave Earth’s gravitational well, but after it fired its main booster to break orbit, NASA lost radio contact with the spacecraft. APL scientists hope to regain communication with Contour in December, when, if the spacecraft is still intact, its main antenna should point directly toward Earth. “We’re not very optimistic about the chances of ever recovering Contour again, but we haven’t given up totally,” says Farquhar, who puts the odds at 10 000 to 1.
The science team is keen to recover the spacecraft because “Contour is the only...
