http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/local/article/0,1299,DRMN_15_4545515,00.html
Colorado craft could return to the stars
Deep Impact and Stardust may be sent on future missions
By Jim Erickson, Rocky Mountain News
March 16, 2006
LEAGUE CITY, Texas - Think of it as celestial recycling.
Comet researchers are finalizing plans to send two highly successful
Colorado-built NASA probes, Stardust and Deep Impact, on new, relatively
low-cost missions to other icy mini-worlds.
Both probes recently finished their main missions. They remain in orbit,
fully operational and with plenty of fuel, awaiting orders.
So what to do with them?
Next month, at least two research teams will propose sending Stardust
and Deep Impact on follow-up comet missions. A third group will suggest
building a twin of Deep Impact - which was developed at Ball Aerospace &
Technologies in Boulder - to execute another comet-busting project.
If approved, the proposed missions would occur early in the next decade.
"If you've got it, use it," said Tucson planetary scientist Michael
Belton, a member of the Deep Impact science team and backer of the three
proposals, called Scar Quest, Dixie and Deep R.
"We certainly don't want to waste investments of hundreds of millions of
dollars, especially when they're up there and ready to go," Belton said
Wednesday at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference outside Houston.
The $212 million Stardust spacecraft was built in Jefferson County by
Lockheed Martin Space Systems. It traveled seven years and nearly 3
billion miles to grab dust from Comet Wild 2, then returned it to Earth
in a small capsule.
The capsule parachuted onto the Utah salt flats Jan. 15.
But the main Stardust spacecraft remains in orbit around the sun. NASA
placed it in hibernation late last month, meaning that all but a few
essential systems - including the solar arrays and the receiving antenna
- were deactivated.
Last July 4, the $333 million Ball-built Deep Impact spacecraft met up
with Comet Tempel 1.
The Deep Impact mother ship fired an 820-pound "bullet" into the dirty
snowball. It threw up a cloud of debris that was photographed by the
mother ship and by Earth-based telescopes.
The copper-reinforced "impactor" vaporized on contact, but the mother
ship remains fully functional and ready for another assignment.
The proposed Scar Quest mission would send Stardust to Comet Tempel 1
for a second look. A main goal would be to find and photograph the
crater blown open by Deep Impact.
The collision ejected a cloud of talcum-fine dust and ice that obscured
camera views of the bowl-shaped hole left behind.
"We'd get the glimpse we never got with Deep Impact," said University of
Arizona planetary scientist H. Jay Melosh, a member of the Deep Impact
science team and a participant in the Scar Quest, Dixie and Deep R
proposals.
The Dixie mission would use the Deep Impact mother ship to fly past
Comet Boethin and photograph it in detail.
Deep R calls for the construction of a new Deep Impact spacecraft - both
impactor and mother ship. It would be sent to Comet
Churyumov-Gerasimenko, which is also the destination of the European
Space Agency's Rosetta probe, launched in 2004.
The idea is that both Deep R and Rosetta would be watching when another
copper-reinforced bullet blasts into Churyumov-Gerasimenko.
All three proposals, and many others, will be submitted to NASA next
month. The concepts will compete to become the next in NASA's Discovery
program of relatively low- cost, tightly focused science missions.
Start-from-scratch Discovery missions have a cost cap of $425 million.
Proposals to use existing spacecraft for new purposes are capped at $35
million. They are called Missions of Opportunity, or MOOs in NASA
acronym-speak.
Both Scar Quest (the scar refers to the crater excavated by Deep Impact)
and Dixie fall into the second category.
President Bush has proposed cutting $3 billion from NASA's space science
budget over the next five years. But so far, the Discovery program has
remained "relatively unscathed," said Michael New, the agency's program
scientist for the Discovery missions.
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