NASA is considering a repeat of the highly successful Deep Impact comet collision with two more missions using spacecraft built by Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corp. in Boulder.
In Ball’s first deep-space foray, the “impactor” from its Deep Impact spacecraft slammed into Comet Tempel 1 in July, spewing dust and icy water to expose chemicals that may have helped start life on Earth. A flyby spacecraft captured the 23,000-mph collision on film.
Comet interiors are thought to be windows to the early universe, containing the originating materials of the solar system.
Now two new missions nicknamed “Daughters of Deep Impact” could tell scientists even more about the solar system’s beginnings.
“Comets are basically remnants from the original nebula from which the solar system was formed. The interior of a comet is the best glimpse of that,” said Bill Purcell, Ball director of Advanced Systems for Civil Space.
The first of the two proposed missions, DIXI – Deep Impact eXtended Investigation – would spend up to $35 million to use the surviving Deep Impact flyby craft for a close-up tour of Comet Boethin in December 2008.
“The question was what do we do with the flyby spacecraft now that it’s completed its (Deep Impact) mission?” said Glen Roat, Ball program manager for Deep Impact. “It performed flawlessly, it’s perfectly healthy and it has roughly half its fuel left.”
The answer was use it again.
Half the discoveries from Comet Tempel 1 were from information gathered by the flyby vehicle before impact.
“DIXI can return half the science of Deep Impact for 10 percent of the cost,” Roat said.
A second mission, the $425 million Deep-Rosetta or DeepR, would clone the Deep Impact mission, building an identical flyby and impactor but targeting Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko for an impact at 22,000 mph on July 29, 2015.
Comet C-G is also the destination of the European Space Agency’s en-route Rosetta mission, which will study the nucleus of the comet and its environment for nearly two years and land a probe on its surface in 2014.
Rosetta, with 21 experiments on board, will study C-G for months before and after the collision with Ball’s impactor.
“With Deep Impact we only had 15 minutes of observation from the time of impact to the time it was out of sight of the flyby,” Roat said.
The new missions can help determine which characteristics of a comet mark the beginnings of the solar system and which are the result of evolutionary forces such as heating, cooling and impacts, scientists say.
As scientists see the interior of more comets, they can figure out which characteristics comets have in common and which are distinctive.
NASA is to make decisions on both missions in September.
Like Deep Impact, DeepR and DIXI would be a partnership between the University of Maryland, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Ball.
Staff writer Dave Curtin can be reached at 303-820-1276 or dcurtin@denverpost.com.
