A Bright, Silent Mystery
They erupt like their rockets into our consciousness, these amazingly complex space explorations, and then fade a long while as their distance grows into numbers beyond mortal comprehension. Radio signals to and from the Voyager I and II spacecraft, dispatched from our galactic neighborhood 25 years ago, take 12 hours each way--at the speed of light.
NASA’s Contour project was launched July 3 with the familiar complex rocketry, dramatic rumbling and starburst publicity of these now-regular space explorations. But suddenly Contour has become a silent, deep-space mystery--and may remain so forever.
Imagine planning and projecting these intragalactic blind dates. The $159-million Contour mission was designed to position the 2,138-pound craft to meet and study two comets, one late next year and one in mid-2006. Comets are moving archeological digs portaging refuse from our solar system’s creation. NASA plans other launches, including the 2004 departure of a spacecraft called Messenger that will swing by Mercury and Venus and then, five years later, orbit Mercury.
It’s courageous to sail into unknown seas. It’s something more to design, package, launch and guide a robot craft from Earth through several years of outer space, anticipating its every need and difficulty in that hostile, freezing, radiation-ridden environment.
Contour orbited Earth successfully, 140 miles above the planet at one point and 71,000 at another. On Aug. 15, on a pass over the Indian Ocean just beneath earshot of deep-space antennas, it was to fire into outer space. Something else happened. Silence. Such craft are programmed, like E.T., to phone home automatically 90 hours after a last command. Nothing. Huge telescopes have detected several objects moving along Contour’s projected trajectory. None answer.
Explorers disappear, sometimes for years, sometimes forever, as they seek New Worlds or Northwest Passages. Columbus was gone more than a year, and Henry Hudson never did return. Even astronauts lose radio contact for some minutes during reentry. Maybe Contour will make contact next summer, when its winter hibernation was to end before a first comet encounter. That’s the drama in going to new places and doing new things--possibly not returning.
For the clever scientific teams assembled to design, build and nurture their mechanical wanderings and wonderings, the remnants of Contour are disappointing chunks of debris speeding 3.8 miles farther from home every second.
For the rest of us, those objects, now in effect man-made mini-comets probably destined to circle the sun uselessly for many of our earthbound lifetimes, can still ignite our imaginations to wonder what primordial secrets their cometary colleagues will now keep a good while longer.
