SpaceshipStardust-NExTNASA will meet thecomet Tempel 1on Valentine’s Day (February 14). The mission will allow scientists for the first time to look for changes in the surface of a comet that occur after completing an orbit around the Sun.
The shipStardust-NExTit will take72 high-resolution images during the meeting, and will trymeasure the composition, distribution and emission of the dust stream in the coma, the material that surrounds the nucleus of the comet. In this way, it will extend the comet investigation initiated by the mission.Deep Impactof NASA, which in July 2005 launched an impactor to the surface of theTemple 1to study its composition. Now, the new probe will be able to capture an image of the crater created by the impactor. This would be an added advantage to the large amount of data that the mission scientists hope to obtain.
Currently, the spacecraft is about 15 million miles away from its destination. Since 2007,Stardust-NExTIt has executed eight trajectory correction maneuvers, it has circled the Sun four times and has used the Earth’s gravity to finally head towardsTemple 1. The spacecraft is expected to fly over the comet, which is about 6 kilometers wide, at a distance of approximately 200 kilometers.
In 2004, theStardust missionwas thefirst to collect particles directly from Comet Wild 2 , as well as interstellar dust. The samples were returned in 2006 for study through a capsule that was detached from the spacecraft and parachuted to Earth southwest of Salt Lake City (USA). In January 2007, NASA renamed the mission asStardust-NEXTand began a four and a half year journey to the cometTemple 1. “You could say that our spacecraft is a veteran of comet campaigns,” explained Tim Larson, Stardust-NExT project manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
