Nov 8 1979
From The Space Library
NASA announced that it and the ESA had asked scientists to propose experiments for an international mission to comets Halley and Tempel 2. The total journey would span four years and cover more than 2.5 billion kilometers (1.6 billion miles). A spacecraft using solar-electricity propulsion engines for the first time in deep space would fly past Halley’s Comet in 1985, release an instrumented probe, and proceed to an encounter with Tempel 2 in 1988, flying side by side with it for a year or more on its path around the Sun. Science objectives would be to define the chemical-physical nature of the comets' nuclei, of the comas, gases, and dust surrounding the nuclei, and of the comets' tails. As comets differ widely, NASA wanted to make sure of this opportunity to sample two different types. (NASA Release 79-147)
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