Late Valentine's Day night, a veteran comet-chasing spacecraft had some brief company after six years of loneliness. It encountered comet Tempel 1, shooting past its icy surface, taking dozens of photographs along the way.
According to mission scientists at the delayed, yet excited, JPL press conference on Tuesday, the NASA Stardust-NExT flyby of comet Tempel 1 wasn't 100 percent successful. "It was 1,000 percent successful!" exclaimed Joe Veverka, Stardust-NExT principal investigator. And if these preliminary deep space photos are anything to go by, the mission scientists have a huge amount of data to sift through.
Browse the growing Stardust-NExT image gallery.
The key purpose of the comet flyby was to see how the surface of a comet changes as it orbits the sun. Six years ago, NASA's Deep Impact mission visited the same comet, so when Stardust peered down at Tempel 1, scientists knew what they were looking for.
For starters, they wanted to see what looked different. By comparing Stardust's photos with that of Deep Impact, Veverka pointed out features that appear to have "eroded" over the last six years. Although it's too early to tell what process has caused the erosion, it seems likely that the icy body, at the mercy of the sun's radiation, has been venting material into space.
SLIDE SHOW: Close Encounters with Comets
Of particular interest was analysis of the impact crater that was caused by Deep Impact's refrigerator-sized copper impactor that created a huge explosion of debris on the comet's surface in 2005. Sure enough, Stardust imaged the impact zone, showing a crater of the approximate size as to what was expected.
But there are some surprises. The crater appears smoother than expected, indicating the crater has somehow "healed itself," according to impact crater expert Peter Schultz. There are also indications that the impact site is covered in the ejecta that was kicked up on impact, consistent with the 2005 observations.
Now that Stardust-NExT has collected 72 photographs of it's Valentine's encounter, and gathered invaluable data about the dust emissions from the comet, according to Tim Larson, Stardust-NExT project manager at JPL, the spacecraft will keep watching the comet as it makes its outbound trip back into the loneliness of space.
While we await more images of comet Tempel 1 to appear online, I'll leave you with a Stardust-NExT animation of the spacecraft's cometary near-kiss:
Browse the growing Stardust-NExT image gallery.
JPL mission site: Stardust-NExT
Tags: Comets
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