NASA's Contour spacecraft has gone missing only six weeks into a planned four-year, $159 million mission to fly past two comets.
Controllers at the Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory near Laurel said yesterday that they lost contact with the one-ton spacecraft early yesterday, shortly after it was scheduled to fire its solid rocket engine and zip away from Earth toward its first rendezvous with a comet in 2003.
They immediately issued an all-points bulletin, asking the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's powerful Deep Space Network antennas to begin searching the skies and listening for Contour's radio signals. Communications experts worked to command the probe to call home.
But by late in the day, there was only silence.
Laboratory spokesman Mike Buckley said yesterday that it is possible the Maryland-built spacecraft's engine misfired or blew up. If so, the mission is likely doomed.
But it was too soon to lose hope, he said. "They're spending more time over there working than worrying. The mood is pretty good still. They're busy. They haven't covered the whole sky yet."
Many of the same laboratory scientists and engineers went through a similar emergency in December 1998, when a liquid-fuel engine on the Hopkins-built NEAR spacecraft misfired en route to the asteroid Eros.
Radio contact with NEAR was lost for several hours. When it was re-established, controllers managed to reprogram the spacecraft and salvage the mission, even though NEAR had lost 70 percent of its fuel.
Contour's mission
Comets are believed to hold the best-preserved evidence of the materials and conditions that combined to form the solar system 4.5 billion years ago. Scientists at the Hopkins lab, Cornell University and 11 other institutions designed Contour (for Comet Nucleus Tour) to gather data at close range to learn more about the composition and structure of comets.
Contour was launched into orbit on July 3. Plans called for its solid-fuel rocket engine to fire at 4:49 a.m. yesterday about 140 miles over the Indian Ocean. The 50-second boost was intended to accelerate the spacecraft to 28,000 mph and send it on a track that would carry it to within 62 miles of the comet Encke in November 2003. That boost was the solid-fuel engine's only role in the mission.
