CONTOUR

[RaQua]

CONTOUR: MISSING IN ACTION

 

At 4:49 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time on August 15th, the Contour spacecraft

was to fire its engine, leave its Earth orbit, and head off into

interplanetary space. When the burn took place, the craft was 225

kilometers (140 miles) above the Indian Ocean, in a blind spot from

communications. Deep-Space Network tracking stations in either Goldstone,

California, or Canberra, Australia, were supposed to reestablish contact

with the spacecraft 46 minutes later. But all attempts to reach the craft

went unanswered....

 

NASA has turned to amateur astronomers for help locating the craft. Since

its launch on July 3rd, many advanced amateurs with the capability to

observe the faintest asteroids have also watched and imaged Contour

orbiting Earth. Even if Contour's burn was successful, it should still be

around 18th magnitude -- within the capabilities of amateurs with large

telescopes and CCD cameras....

 

http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/current/article_700_1.asp

 

 

CONTOUR'S FATE LOOKS "BLEAK"

 

Although efforts to reestablish contact with the Contour spacecraft

continue, mission managers now suspect that the craft was destroyed during

a rocket firing on August 15th. Convincing evidence came from images

acquired by the Spacewatch telescope about 20 hours afterward, showing two

objects separated in the sky by about 460 kilometers and located some

460,000 km from Earth....

 

Mission mananger Robert W. Farquhar and his team received the Spacewatch

image in response to a call to professional and amateur astronomers to

help locate the spacecraft. The image shows a pair of 18th-magnitude

objects, one approximately three times brighter than the other. According

to David W. Dunham, head of the mission-design team, the objects were then

within 0.6 degrees of where Contour would have been if on its correct

interplanetary trajectory, and their positions suggest that Contour's

solid-fuel STAR-30 rocket motor provided about 3 percent less total thrust

than expected. Dunham estimates that "Contour A" and "Contour B" are

moving apart at roughly 6 meters per second (14 miles per hour). It is not

yet clear what the two pieces might be. "The spacecraft was built around

the STAR motor," Dunham notes, "and they weren't supposed to separate...."

 

http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/current/article_712_1.asp

 

 

NASA appoints CONTOUR mission investigation team

NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe has announced that Chief Engineer Theron M. Bradley Jr. will lead a team to investigate the apparent loss of the CONTOUR mission space probe. The investigation team will independently examine all aspects of the CONTOUR mission, which has been out of contact with controllers since a scheduled engine firing Aug. 15.

 

http://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n0208/26contour/

[RaQua]

Contour Watch Winds Down

 

Spaceflight engineers have little hope for recovering the Comet Nucleus

Tour (Contour) spacecraft, though they will continue to listen

periodically for its signal through December. The comet-bound craft was

last heard from on August 15th, just before a solid-fuel rocket was to

propel it from its temporary Earth orbit into interplanetary space.

Telescopic images later showed two objects leaving Earth along (but a

little behind) the predicted trajectory. "Obviously, we had a big

problem," comments Robert Farquhar, the Contour mission manager at Johns

Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory. Although the cause of the

mission-ending malfunction may never be determined with certainty, for now

the APL team is presuming either that the Star 30 motor ruptured just

before the end of its 50-second-long firing, or that heat from the rocket

triggered the failure of some other component (such as the tanks of

hydrazine fuel used for smaller maneuvers).

 

The Contour team hopes to convince NASA to build a replacement craft,

which might be launched as soon as 2006. However, this effort would

overlap -- and compete for scarce funds - with the proposed New Horizons

mission to Pluto, which APL is also building. Meanwhile, NASA

administrator Sean O'Keefe has tasked Theron Bradley Jr., the space

agency's chief engineer, to lead the investigation into Contour's loss.

Bradley is expected to report his panel's findings in six to eight weeks.

 

Sky&Telescope