Dec 20 2002
From The Space Library
After several unsuccessful attempts to contact the Comet Nucleus Tour (CONTOUR) satellite, NASA and Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory concluded that CONTOUR was lost. The objectives of the CONTOUR mission had been to maneuver to a distance of 60 kilometers (100 miles) from at least two comets, capturing high-resolution images and performing various compositional analyses of the comets' near-nucleus-environment compositional material. NASA had launched CONTOUR on 3 July 2002 but had lost contact with the satellite on 15 August 2002 after a maneuver intended to shift CONTOUR from Earth orbit to an orbit in which it would encounter the comet Encke. (NASA, “Discovery Mission: CONTOUR,” http://discovery.nasa.gov/contour.html (accessed 31 October 2008).)
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