Spacecraft Might Have Broken Up

A NASA spacecraft on a four-year mission to probe the heart of two comets has apparently broken into two pieces, according to astronomers who believe they captured an image of the wounded spacecraft.

The $159-million Contour spacecraft had been incommunicado since early Thursday when its solid-propellant rocket motor was scheduled to fire and boost the space probe out of Earth’s orbit.

The mission team had been working since then, hoping to reestablish contact with the craft--until they saw the photo.

“You see two pieces floating around like that and it’s not encouraging,” mission director Robert Farquhar said in a news conference from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, the organization that built the spacecraft for NASA.

The picture shows the region where the spacecraft was estimated to be, an area 250,000 miles from Earth. Instead of showing one object, the picture shows two distinct objects. They are about 155 miles away from each other.

“At first I thought, great, that’s the spacecraft and the rocket booster. But then I learned it wasn’t supposed to separate,” said Jim Scotti, a planetary scientist in the University of Arizona’s Spacewatch program who used a telescope atop Kitt Peak to search for the missing Contour.

Farquhar said the most likely explanation for the images were that the spacecraft had lost a significant piece or had broken apart. He said it was possible that the second object, which is dimmer, may be something like insulation.

Making the observation was difficult because the spacecraft was traveling in front of the middle of the Milky Way, where star density is extremely thick, Scotti said.

Working through the night to make the observation, Scotti did not find the objects immediately. His colleague Jeff Larsen detected the two objects Friday morning.

Farquhar, though “a little discouraged,” said his team is not yet giving up and will spend the weekend trying to contact the spacecraft and determine what might have caused a failure.

The photograph indicates that the motor did indeed fire to take the craft out of Earth orbit. Contour is speeding away from our planet and not in any danger of falling back. It is too far away from Earth for a shuttle mission to reach it for repairs, Farquhar said.

It is still unclear, he said, what happened as the engine fired. “We haven’t found any smoking guns,” he said. “Everything seemed to be normal going into the burn and then we couldn’t find it.”

The burn to push the spacecraft out of Earth orbit is a critical part of the mission but is not considered especially risky, he said. The motor aboard the craft is routinely used in Earth-orbiting satellites and is considered reliable.

The Contour craft was slated to chase two comets around the sun and come within 70 miles of them to study the primitive material that made up the solar system.