The US probe EPOXI is preparing to meet Comet Hartley 2 today and cross it only 700 km away from the nucleus, as announced by NASA. It will be the fifth time in history that a spacecraft gets close enough to a comet to image its nucleus .
The approach of the EPOXI probe (Extrasolar Planetary Observation and Extended Deep Impact Investigation) to Hartley 2, after a journey of two and a half years equivalent to traveling 18 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun, will take place at 14:02 GMT . Its mission is to observe the temperature of the comet, measure its size, create a model of its nucleus, study the distribution of gases and dust, catalog the different volatile compounds, take images of the surface and record the way in which the craters are distributed.
Hartley 2 , discovered by Malcolm Hartley in 1986 with the help of a Schmidt telescope at the Siding Spring Observatory in Australia, passes between the Earth and the Sun every 6 1/2 years. The little comet, with its green tail, approached 18 million kilometers from Earth on October 20, the closest it can get.
