HOUSTON -- International Space Station Commander Dan Burbank captured spectacular imagery of Comet Lovejoy, viewed from about 240 miles above the Earth’s horizon on Wednesday, Dec. 21.
Today Burbank described seeing the comet as “the most amazing thing I have ever seen in space,” in an interview with WDIV-TV in Detroit. Burbank took hundreds of still images of the comet.
The images also were processed into a time-lapse video that will air on NASA TV at 4 p.m. CST.
The video, including Burbank’s comments, and a selection of the individual images are available online at http://www.nasa.gov/station.
For additional images and information on Comet Lovejoy, visit http://www.nasa.gov/sunearth.
For NASA TV downlink, schedule and streaming video information, visit
PASADENA, Calif. -- In a celestial forensic exercise, scientists analyzing data from NASA's Cassini, Galileo and New Horizons missions have traced telltale ripples in Saturn and Jupiter's rings to specific collisions with cometary fragments that occurred decades, not millions of years, ago.
Jupiter's ripple-producing culprit was comet Shoemaker-Levy 9. The comet's debris cloud hurtled through the thin Jupiter ring system on a collision course into the planet in July 1994. Scientists attribute Saturn's ripples to a similar object - likely another cloud of comet debris - plunging through the inner rings in 1983. The findings are detailed in two papers published Thursday in the journal Science.
"We're finding evidence that a planet's rings can be affected by specific, traceable events that happened in the last 30 years, rather than a hundred million years ago," said Matthew Hedman, a Cassini imaging team associate, lead author on one of the papers, and a research associate at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. "The solar system is a much more dynamic place than we gave it credit for."
Scientists learned about the patchy patterns in Jupiter's rings in the late 1990s from Galileo's visit to Jupiter. Unfortunately, the images from that mission were fuzzy, and scientists didn't understand why such patterns would occur. Not until Cassini entered orbit around Saturn in 2004 and started sending back thousands of images did scientists have a better picture of the activity. A 2007 science paper by Hedman and colleagues first noted corrugations in Saturn's innermost ring, dubbed the D ring.
A group including Hedman and Mark Showalter, a Cassini co-investigator based at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., saw that the grooves in the D ring appeared to wind together more tightly over time. Playing the process backward, Hedman demonstrated the pattern originated when something tilted the D ring off its axis by about 300 feet (100 meters) in late 1983. The scientists found Saturn's gravity on the tilted area warped the ring into a tightening spiral.
Cassini imaging scientists received another clue around August 2009 when the sun shone directly along Saturn's equator and lit the rings edge-on. The unique lighting conditions highlighted ripples not previously seen in another part of the ring system. Whatever happened in 1983 was big - not a small, localized event.
The collision tilted a region more than 12,000 miles (19,000 kilometers) wide, covering part of the D ring and the next outermost ring, called the C ring. Unfortunately, spacecraft were not visiting Saturn at that time, and the planet was on the far side of the sun out of sight from ground or space-based telescopes.
Hedman and Showalter, the lead author on the second paper, wondered whether the long-forgotten pattern in Jupiter's ring system might illuminate the mystery. Using Galileo images from 1996 and 2000, Showalter confirmed a similar winding spiral pattern by applying the same math they had applied to Saturn and factoring in Jupiter's gravitational influence. Galileo was launched on a space shuttle in 1989 and studied Jupiter until 2003.
Unwinding the spiral pinpointed the date when Jupiter's ring was tilted off its axis between June and September 1994. Shoemaker-Levy plunged into the Jovian atmosphere in late July. The Galileo images also revealed a second spiral, which was calculated to have originated in 1990. Images taken by New Horizons in 2007, when the spacecraft flew by Jupiter on its way to Pluto, showed two newer ripple patterns, in addition to the fading echo of the Shoemaker-Levy impact.
"We now know that collisions into the rings are very common – a few times per decade for Jupiter and a few times per century for Saturn," Showalter said. "Now scientists know that the rings record these impacts like grooves in a vinyl record, and we can play back their history later."
Launched in Oct. 15, 1997, Cassini began orbiting Saturn in 2004 and sends back data daily.
"Finding these fingerprints still in the rings is amazing and helps us better understand impact processes in our solar system," said Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist, based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "Cassini's long sojourn around Saturn has helped us tease out subtle clues that tell us about the history of our origins."
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The mission is managed by JPL for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo. For more information about Cassini, visit http://www.nasa.gov/cassini.
Pluto New Horizons launched in 2006 on the first mission to study Pluto and the Kuiper Belt. The mission is managed by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., for NASA. The mission is part of the New Frontiers program managed at the agency's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. For more information about Pluto New Horizons, visit http://www.nasa.gov/newhorizons.
PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA's Stardust spacecraft returned new images of a comet showing a scar resulting from the 2005 Deep Impact mission. The images also showed the comet has a fragile and weak nucleus.
The spacecraft made its closest approach to comet Tempel 1 on Monday, Feb. 14, at at a distance of approximately 111 miles. Stardust took 72 high-resolution images of the comet. It also accumulated 468 kilobytes of data about the dust in its coma, the cloud that is a comet's atmosphere. The craft is on its second mission of exploration called Stardust-NExT, having completed its prime mission collecting cometary particles and returning them to Earth in 2006.
The Stardust-NExT mission met its goals which included observing surface features that changed in areas previously seen during the 2005 Deep Impact mission; imaging new terrain; and viewing the crater generated when the 2005 mission propelled an impactor at the comet.
"This mission is 100 percent successful," said Joe Veverka, Stardust-NExT principal investigator of CornellUniversity, Ithaca, N.Y. "We saw a lot of new things that we didn't expect, and we'll be working hard to figure out what Tempel 1 is trying to tell us."
Several of the images provide tantalizing clues to the result of the Deep Impact mission's collision with Tempel 1.
"We see a crater with a small mound in the center, and it appears that some of the ejecta went up and came right back down," said Pete Schultz of Brown University, Providence, R.I. "This tells us this cometary nucleus is fragile and weak based on how subdued the crater is we see today."
Engineering telemetry downlinked after closest approach indicates the spacecraft flew through waves of disintegrating cometary particles including a dozen impacts that penetrated more than one layer of its protective shielding.
"The data indicate Stardust went through something similar to a B-17 bomber flying through flak in World War II," said Don Brownlee, Stardust-NExT co-investigator from the University of Washington in Seattle. "Instead of having a little stream of uniform particles coming out, they apparently came out in chunks and crumbled."
While the Valentine's Day night encounter of Tempel 1 is complete, the spacecraft will continue to look at its latest cometary obsession from afar.
"This spacecraft has logged over 3.5 billion miles since launch, and while its last close encounter is complete, its mission of discovery is not," said Tim Larson, Stardust-NExT project manager at JPL. "We'll continue imaging the comet as long as the science team can gain useful information, and then Stardust will get its well-deserved rest."
Stardust-NExT is a low-cost mission that is expanding the investigation of comet Tempel 1 initiated by the Deep Impact spacecraft. The mission is managed by JPL for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver built the spacecraft and manages day-to-day mission operations.
For more information about Stardust-NExT, visit http://stardustnext.jpl.nasa.gov.
PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA has rescheduled the news conference about the Stardust-NExT comet flyby for () today. The briefing will release images and early data from the comet encounter and will be carried live on NASA Television and the agency's website.
The participants are:
-Ed Weiler, NASA's associate administrator, Science Mission Directorate, Washington
-Joe Veverka, Stardust-NExT principal investigator, CornellUniversity
The news conference was originally scheduled for (). The additional time will allow scientists to process and analyze data and images gathered when the spacecraft flew past comet Tempel 1, with closest approach at a distance of 112 miles. The mission team had expected the closest-approach images to be sent first. Instead, the images were downlinked in chronological order, starting with the most distant approach views.
The briefing also can be viewed on one of JPL's Ustream channels at http://www.ustream.tv/user/NASAJPL2.
The first six, most distant approach images are available online at http://www.nasa.gov/stardust and http://www.jpl.nasa.gov.
For NASA TV streaming video, scheduling and downlink information, visit http://www.nasa.gov/ntv.
PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA will host several live media activities for the Stardust-NExT mission's close encounter with comet Tempel 1. The closest approach is expected at approximately , with confirmation received on Earth at about on Monday, Feb. 14.
Live coverage of the Tempel 1 encounter will begin at Feb. 14 on NASA Television and the agency's website. The coverage will include live commentary from mission control at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., and video from Lockheed Martin Space System's mission support area in Denver.
A news briefing is planned for on Feb. 15. Scheduled participants are:
-Joe Veverka, Stardust-NExT principal investigator, CornellUniversity
-Tim Larson, Stardust-NExT project manager, JPL
-Don Brownlee, Stardust-NExT co-investigator, University of Washington, Seattle
To cover the Tempel 1 flyby at JPL, journalists must contact the JPL Media Relations Office at 818-354-5011. Valid media credentials are required. Non-U.S. citizens must bring passports.
Starting Feb. 14 at 8 p.m., news media representatives can watch live coverage of the control room via a feed to JPL's von Karman Auditorium. The auditorium will remain open through the evening for media. Reporters who will not travel to JPL may call the Media Relations Office to make arrangements to ask questions during the Feb. 15 briefing.
Mission coverage schedule (all times PST and subject to change):
, Feb. 14: Live NASA TV commentary begins from mission control; includes coverage of closest approach and the re-establishment of contact with the spacecraft following the encounter.
Midnight to 1:30 a.m., Feb. 15: NASA TV commentary will chronicle the arrival and processing of the first five of 72 close-approach images expected to be down linked after the encounter. The images are expected to include a close-up view of the comet's surface.
, Feb. 15: News briefing
Starting on Feb. 9, NASA TV will air Stardust-NExT mission animation and b-roll during its Video File segments. For NASA TV streaming video, scheduling and downlink information, visit http://www.nasa.gov/ntv.
Live commentary and the news conference also will be carried live on one of JPL's Ustream channels. Viewers during events can engage in a real-time chat and submit questions to the Stardust-NExT team at http://www.ustream.tv/user/NASAJPL2.
The public can watch a real-time animation of the Stardust-NExT comet flyby using NASA's new "Eyes on the Solar System" Web tool. JPL created this 3-D environment, which allows people to explore the solar system directly from their computers. It is available at http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/eyes.
This flyby of Tempel 1 will give scientists an opportunity to look for changes on the comet's surface since it was visited by NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft in July 2005. Since then, Tempel 1 has completed one orbit of the sun, and scientists are looking forward to monitoring any differences in the comet.
During its 12 years in space, Stardust became the first spacecraft to collect samples of a comet (Wild 2) in 2004, which were sent in 2006 to Earth for study. The mission is managed by JPL for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver built the spacecraft and manages day-to-day mission operations.
A press kit and other detailed information about Stardust-NExT is available at http://stardustnext.jpl.nasa.gov.
PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA will host several live media activities for the Stardust-NExT mission's close encounter with comet Tempel 1. The closest approach is expected at approximately , with confirmation received on Earth at about on Monday, Feb. 14.
Live coverage of the Tempel 1 encounter will begin at Feb. 14 on NASA Television and the agency's website. The coverage will include live commentary from mission control at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., and video from Lockheed Martin Space System's mission support area in Denver.
A news briefing is planned for on Feb. 15. Scheduled participants are:
-Joe Veverka, Stardust-NExT principal investigator, CornellUniversity
-Tim Larson, Stardust-NExT project manager, JPL
-Don Brownlee, Stardust-NExT co-investigator, University of Washington, Seattle
To cover the Tempel 1 flyby at JPL, journalists must contact the JPL Media Relations Office at 818-354-5011. Valid media credentials are required. Non-U.S. citizens must bring passports.
Starting Feb. 14 at 8 p.m., news media representatives can watch live coverage of the control room via a feed to JPL's von Karman Auditorium. The auditorium will remain open through the evening for media. Reporters who will not travel to JPL may call the Media Relations Office to make arrangements to ask questions during the Feb. 15 briefing.
Mission coverage schedule (all times PST and subject to change):
, Feb. 14: Live NASA TV commentary begins from mission control; includes coverage of closest approach and the re-establishment of contact with the spacecraft following the encounter.
Midnight to 1:30 a.m., Feb. 15: NASA TV commentary will chronicle the arrival and processing of the first five of 72 close-approach images expected to be down linked after the encounter. The images are expected to include a close-up view of the comet's surface.
, Feb. 15: News briefing
Starting on Feb. 9, NASA TV will air Stardust-NExT mission animation and b-roll during its Video File segments. For NASA TV streaming video, scheduling and downlink information, visit http://www.nasa.gov/ntv.
Live commentary and the news conference also will be carried live on one of JPL's Ustream channels. Viewers during events can engage in a real-time chat and submit questions to the Stardust-NExT team at http://www.ustream.tv/user/NASAJPL2.
The public can watch a real-time animation of the Stardust-NExT comet flyby using NASA's new "Eyes on the Solar System" Web tool. JPL created this 3-D environment, which allows people to explore the solar system directly from their computers. It is available at http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/eyes.
This flyby of Tempel 1 will give scientists an opportunity to look for changes on the comet's surface since it was visited by NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft in July 2005. Since then, Tempel 1 has completed one orbit of the sun, and scientists are looking forward to monitoring any differences in the comet.
During its 12 years in space, Stardust became the first spacecraft to collect samples of a comet (Wild 2) in 2004, which were sent in 2006 to Earth for study. The mission is managed by JPL for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver built the spacecraft and manages day-to-day mission operations.
A press kit and other detailed information about Stardust-NExT is available at http://stardustnext.jpl.nasa.gov.
Stardust-NExT is a mission to reuse the Stardust spacecraft to further the exploration of comet Tempel 1.
Tempel 1 was the target of Deep Impact. Deep Impact discovered that this is a most interesting comet.
We want to see more of the surface and we also want to see what changes have occurred since Deep Impact was there five years ago. The primary purpose is to observe how the comet has changed;how the nucleus has changed, to compare to what it was like back in 2005 with the previous pass near the sun. We call them perihelion passes. We also would want to extend the mapping and the observation of the nucleus to see new areas of the nucleus that we haven’t seen before.
So that it would help complete the mapping of the nucleus of this comet. And then, if possible, we would like to be able to image the crater that was left behind. The key challenges for an extended mission like this are one, dealing with the age of the spacecraft.
The spacecraft is almost 12 years old. Very little fuel is left; we’ve used most of it already. And then the third challenge, for a comet mission, is the navigation. One of the navigation challenges with getting close to a comet is predicting its trajectory.
We know that, as they get close to the sun, comets generate a lot of activity. The jets, the outbursts, all of those change the trajectory somewhat of the comet. We have a navigation camera and we photograph where the comet is on approach, and then we take that information, turn it into trajectory corrections, to put us in the right place at the right time.
One of the challenges of designing a spacecraft to go to a comet is, how do you protect it? There’s a coma that goes out in front of the comet. And that coma contains particles that could be large.
We’re flying by at a little over ten kilometers per second. That’s somewhat on the order of 25,000 miles per hour. It doesn’t take much of a particle to cause damage.
The Stardust spacecraft is a very unique spacecraft. It was built for a comet flyby. So, it was built to fly close to a comet. And because of that, it has some very robust shields on the front of the spacecraft that will be able to stop a centimeter-sized particle traveling six kilometers per second and not damage the spacecraft.
These are exciting things. They’re all different. Every time we go near one we find something new, and the opportunity for discovery is absolutely momentous.
WASHINGTON -- NASA's NEOWISE mission has completed its survey of small bodies, asteroids and comets, in our solar system. The mission's discoveries of previously unknown objects include 20 comets, more than 33,000 asteroids in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter, and 134 near-Earth objects (NEOs). The NEOs are asteroids and comets with orbits that come within 28 million miles of Earth's path around the sun.
NEOWISE is an enhancement of the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, mission that launched in December 2009. WISE scanned the entire celestial sky in infrared light about 1.5 times. It captured more than 2.7 million images of objects in space, ranging from faraway galaxies to asteroids and comets close to Earth.
In early October 2010, after completing its prime science mission, the spacecraft ran out of frozen coolant that keeps its instrumentation cold. However, two of its four infrared cameras remained operational. These two channels were still useful for asteroid hunting, so NASA extended the NEOWISE portion of the WISE mission by four months, with the primary purpose of hunting for more asteroids and comets, and to finish one complete scan of the main asteroid belt.
“Even just one year of observations from the NEOWISE project has significantly increased our catalog of data on NEOs and the other small bodies of the solar systems,” said Lindley Johnson, NASA’s program executive for the NEO Observation Program.
Now that NEOWISE has successfully completed a full sweep of the main asteroid belt, the WISE spacecraft will go into hibernation mode and remain in polar orbit around the Earth, where it could be called back into service in the future.
In addition to discovering new asteroids and comets, NEOWISE also confirmed the presence of objects in the main belt that already had been detected. In just one year, it observed about 153,000 rocky bodies out of approximately 500,000 known objects. Those include the 33,000 that NEOWISE discovered.
NEOWISE also observed known objects closer and farther to us than the main belt, including roughly 2,000 asteroids that orbit along with Jupiter, hundreds of NEOs and more than 100 comets.
These observations will be key to determining the objects' sizes and compositions. Visible-light data alone reveals how much sunlight reflects off an asteroid, whereas infrared data is much more directly related to the object's size. By combining visible and infrared measurements, astronomers also can learn about the compositions of the rocky bodies -- for example, whether they are solid or crumbly. The findings will lead to a much-improved picture of the various asteroid populations.
NEOWISE took longer to survey the whole asteroid belt than WISE took to scan the entire sky because most of the asteroids are moving in the same direction around the sun as the spacecraft moves while it orbits the Earth. The spacecraft field of view had to catch up to, and lap, the movement of the asteroids in order to see them all.
"You can think of Earth and the asteroids as racehorses moving along in a track," said Amy Mainzer, the principal investigator of NEOWISE at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "We're moving along together around the sun, but the main belt asteroids are like horses on the outer part of the track. They take longer to orbit than us, so we eventually lap them."
NEOWISE data on the asteroid and comet orbits are catalogued at the NASA-funded International Astronomical Union's MinorPlanetCenter, a clearinghouse for information about all solar system bodies at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass. The science team is analyzing the infrared observations now and will publish new findings in the coming months.
When combined with WISE observations, NEOWISE data will aid in the discovery of the closest dim stars, called brown dwarfs. These observations have the potential to reveal a brown dwarf even closer to us than our closest known star, Proxima Centauri, if such an object does exist. Likewise, if there is a hidden gas-giant planet in the outer reaches of our solar system, data from WISE and NEO-WISE could detect it.
The first batch of observations from the WISE mission will be available to the public and astronomical community in April. "WISE has unearthed a mother lode of amazing sources, and we're having a great time figuring out their nature," said Edward (Ned) Wright, the principal investigator of WISE at UCLA.
JPL manages WISE for NASA's Science Mission Directorate at the agency's headquarters in Washington. The mission was competitively selected under NASA's Explorers Program, which NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., manages. The Space Dynamics Laboratory in Logan, Utah, built the science instrument, and Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. of Boulder, Colo., built the spacecraft. Science operations and data processing take place at the Infrared Processing and AnalysisCenter at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. JPL manages NEOWISE for NASA's Planetary Sciences Division. The mission's data processing also takes place at the Infrared Processing and AnalysisCenter.
For more information about WISE, visit http://www.nasa.gov/wise.
Platt: A sweetheart of a comet flyby. I'm Jane Platt with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Make sure to mark February 14 on your calendar—that's when NASA's StardustNext spacecraft has a Valentine's Day rendezvous with a comet. A familiar spacecraft, a familiar comet. Stardust, as it was originally called, collected samples of comet Wild 2 in 2004 and returned them to Earth in 2006. It's now low on fuel but still orbiting, and now called StardustNext, and the craft is zooming toward comet Tempel 1. That is the same comet that successfully collided with NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft in 2005. Joining us today—Stardust-NExT Project Manager Tim Larson of JPL. What's the main goal of Stardust-NExT and what do we hope to learn by visiting comet Tempel 1 again?
Larson: The main goal of Stardust-NExT is to revisit a comet. In this case, the comet that we had the opportunity to go to is comet Tempel 1. We were there in 2005 with the Deep Impact spacecraft, and this is a golden opportunity, the first time we've ever been able to revisit a comet on a second pass near the sun. So this will give us important information about how the surface of the comets change with each passage near the sun, whether the changes in the comet are global or just specific to certain areas on the surface. So this is the very first time we've been able to do something like this.
Platt: And refresh everybody's memory—what do we know already about comet Tempel 1.
Larson: We know that comet Tempel 1 has a huge variety of features on its surface. We have found smooth areas that look like material flows, there are rough, pitted areas, there are craters on the surface, which we don't know if they're impact craters or if they're caused by material coming out from the inside of the comet. So this is a very interesting comet in terms of variety of terrain.
Platt: And why are comets so interesting in general to scientists, and to all of us?
Larson: The comets are of interest to the science community because they're considered to contain the pristine record of the materials that were around the solar system when it was first forming 4-1/2 billion years ago. So it gives us a unique insight into the beginnings of the solar system.
Platt: Where is Stardust-NExT right now? Stardust-NExT is right now several million kilometers away from comet Tempel 1, approaching at the rate of 10 kilometers per second. And the spacecraft and the comet are both on the opposite side of the solar system from Earth, so we're about two astronomical units away from Earth right now.
Platt: And how many miles per hour is it zooming?
Larson: 10 kilometers per second is roughly equivalent to about 24, 000 miles per hour.
Platt: How close will it be during closest approach, which is about 8:30 p.m. Pacific time, in the U.S. time zones, on February 14th?
Larson: Right, on the PacificCoast, the closest approach will occur around . At that point we'll be about 200 kilometers away from the surface of the comet, that's our aim point. That's about 124, 128 miles from the comet. So this is a very close approach, the closest we've ever been to the surface of a comet.
Platt: Basically StardustNext is a recycled spacecraft, it was originally Stardust, flew past comet Wild 2, brought back samples. What kind of engineering tricks had to happen to make it into what it is now and what it's doing?
Larson: The primary challenge with reusing a spacecraft like Stardust is, first of all, designing a new mission that it can accomplish with the fuel that it has left. And through some clever mission design using some carefully timed trajectory correction maneuvers and taking advantage of some Earth gravity assists, we were able to modify the trajectory of the spacecraft to get it out close to Tempel 1. So that's been the primary challenge, and along with that is conserving and watching the fuel that we have on board and making sure that we have enough fuel left to finish off this mission. Beyond that, there have been a few challenges in terms of aging equipment on board the spacecraft, the spacecraft will be 12 years old in early February, and it's well beyond it's design life. And although everything is generally healthy on board, we have had a couple of pieces of equipment that were starting to age, and starting to degrade slightly. So we switched over to backup equipment so we were on fresh, healthy equipment, and we still have functioning equipment as backups.
Platt: So how do you prepare yourselves and the spacecraft in the next couple of weeks?
Larson: The preparations in terms of all the design of the flyby sequences and software, those are almost complete. Those sequences have been built, we're just finishing up the testing program right now to validate that they work, that they do what we want them to do. So from now on, most of our work is going to be watching our daily optical navigation images, we're tracking where the comet is relative to the spacecraft, and that will feed into our trajectory correction maneuvers, we have three more of those left before we arrive at the comet. And those will be used to target the spacecraft to the desired flyby point.
Platt: Off the top of your head, do you have the dates?
Larson: Yes, these TCMs will occur on January 31, February 7, and then the last fully designed TCM will occur on February 12, two days before we arrive.
Platt: And what are the possibilities image-wise, what might we see with the spacecraft at Tempel 1?
Larson: As we fly by Tempel 1, we have a limit of 72 images that we can take with the spacecraft and store on board. So those will be carefully timed to center them around the closest approach to the comet, so we can get the best possible resolution. We should be able to get around three dozen images that are at better than 80 meters per pixel resolution and our closest approach images should be down below 20 meters per pixel resolution. That will be good enough to resolve a lot of the key features on the surface of the comet and start that process of comparison.
Platt: Anything else you want people to know about the spacecraft, the mission?
Larson: The stardust spacecraft, this will be the culminating event of its career. This spacecraft is about 12 years old now, we're low on fuel, and so after we finish this flyby, we will have capped off an incredibly successful career for this spacecraft, with a very successful primary mission, sample return, two flybys of an asteroid and a comet, now a third flyby with Tempel 1. I think its good to note that NASA does everything that it can to get as much as it can out of these spacecraft, and this becomes a very cost-effective way to keep getting new science for the science community to work on over the years.
Platt: All right, thanks a lot, Tim, and course, best of luck for the flyby.
Larson: Well, thank you Jane. All of us are very excited about this flyby and we're looking forward to February 14.
Platt: Okay, More information on Stardust Next is online at http://stardustnext.jpl.nasa.gov. Thanks for joining us. You've been listening to a podcast from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
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