As the observer who got the images of the spacecraft, it's certainly a sad day for comet research. Our images (in the following URL) show two trails rather than the one expected, so something catastrophic must have happened. Previous spacecraft, like NEAR had two trails as well as the booster was ejected, but I guess that was not supposed to happen to CONTOUR. I wonder what the two pieces are? The spacecraft was at about the -3% of from nominal burn location, so the engine burn was completed or nearly so. http://spacewatch.lpl.arizona.edu/contour.html http://spacewatch.lpl.arizona.edu/Jeff/contour.jpg The first URL describes the image, the second is the image. The spacecraft is in a very dense star field near the Galactic plane, so in order to see it, I subtracted the 2nd image from the first so the first image is the white pair, the second is the dark pair and the residual signal from the field stars appear as conjoined black/white pairs since they don't perfectly subtract out. Jim. On Fri, 16 Aug 2002, Ed Cannon wrote: > "CONTOUR Spacecraft Possibly Destroyed, NASA Says" > > "... [CONTOUR Mission Director Robert] Farquhar said late Friday that > images from a ground-based telescope of two unknown objects about 250 > kilometers apart appeared to be pieces of the comet-chasing craft. He > said more investigation was needed to confirm the suspicion and that a > concerted search effort would continue at least through Monday in the > meantime. ... > > "In a teleconference with reporters Friday evening, Farquhar said the > craft's engines had almost certainly fired and that it was no longer > in Earth orbit." > > Source: > > http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/contour_telecon_020816.html > > ----------------------------------------------------------------- > Unsubscribe from SeeSat-L by sending a message with 'unsubscribe' > in the SUBJECT to SeeSat-L-request@lists.satellite.eu.org > http://www.satellite.eu.org/seesat/seesatindex.html > > Jim Scotti Lunar & Planetary Laboratory jscotti@pirl.lpl.arizona.edu University of Arizona Tucson, AZ 85721 USA http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/~jscotti/ ----------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe from SeeSat-L by sending a message with 'unsubscribe' in the SUBJECT to SeeSat-L-request@lists.satellite.eu.org http://www.satellite.eu.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
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