Mission to Seek Piece of Comet

The European Space Agency has committed $400 million to a mission to land a space probe on a comet and bring back as much as 30 pounds of its nucleus to Earth, a scientist said today.

“We’re not just talking about a hypothetical mission. It’s going to fly,” said John Wood of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. The launch could happen as early as 1995, he said, but probably will be at least several years after that. Wood, a geologist, is a member of a committee of U.S. and European scientists who have been meeting for a year to propose experiments for the unmanned flight and are just completing their report to the European Space Agency.