Deep Impact flyby spacecraft may get new job

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NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C. has given Deep Impact project leaders the green light to perform a maneuver later this month to bring the spacecraft back to Earth in early 2008, said Donald Yeomans, Supervisor of the Solar System Dynamics Group at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.

Yeomans told SPACE.com that, presumably, the Deep Impact project would have to obtain extended mission funds via a new — and successful — Discovery proposal.

"Using an Earth swingby, the spacecraft could be re-targeted to comet 85P/Boethin in late 2008," Yeomans said. Cameras on-board the Flyby spacecraft have shown their abilities to provide impressive imaging. Additionally, the infrared spectrometer has also performed beautifully, he said.

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Scientists are delighted given the bang-up findings from the Deep Impact earlier this month. In particular, experts can now compare and contrast observations between several comets.

One minor concern
"To my mind, one of the key results of the Deep Impact mission is that there are major differences between the nuclei of Halley, Borrelly, Wild 2 and Tempel 1," Yeomans noted. "Tempel 1, at least, does not seem to conform to the ‘fresh surface -- no impact craters -- crusted over dirty iceball model’ that seemed so popular prior to Deep Impact."

That being the case, Yeomans added, the more cometary nuclei that can be studied at high resolution the better. "Comet Boethin is one of the most accessible periodic comets for the Deep Impact spacecraft and with the shortest flight time," he said.

But there is one minor concern about Boethin, Yeoman explained. It has only been seen in 1975 and 1986. It was missed at its 1997 return to the Sun, he said, because it was on the other side of the Sun from Earth at the time.

"I’d be a bit more comfortable if one of our large aperture telescopes could recover the comet this year or next…prior to its return to perihelion [closest approach to the Sun] in 2008," Yeomans concluded.

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