Jul 3 2007
From The Space Library
NASA announced that it had assigned new tasks to two spacecraft that had completed their original missions under the Discovery program. In their mission extensions, NASA’s Stardust and Deep Impact would use their flight-proven hardware to revisit a comet for the first time, to investigate an unexplored comet, and to search for small planets around stars with known large planets. NASA had selected Deep Impact’s mothership Flyby to perform two new tasks under the EPOXI mission, which combined the Deep Impact Extended Investigation (DIXI) and the Extrasolar Planet Observation and Characterization (EPOCh) investigation. Flyby had successfully crashed its Impactor probe into comet Tempel 1 on 4 July 2005. For the DIXI mission, Flyby would investigate the previously unexplored comet Boethin, enabling NASA to recover some of the science lost with the 2002 failure of the Comet Nucleus Tour (CONTOUR) mission. On the way to Boethin, the Deep Impact craft would perform the EPOCh investigation, observing several nearby bright stars, collecting data that would help astronomers characterize giant planets, and measuring the mid-infrared spectrum of Earth, to provide comparative data for the future study of the atmospheres of extrasolar planets. Stardust’s new assignment was the New Exploration of Tempel 1 (NExT) mission to observe the comet after its innermost swing past the Sun. Associate Administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate S. Alan Stern explained that using spacecraft already in flight would enable NASA to accomplish the missions for approximately 15 percent of the cost of starting new ones.
NASA, “NASA Gives Two Successful Spacecraft New Assignments,” news release 07-147, 3 July 2007, http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2007/jul/HQ_07147_Discovery_missions.html (accessed 9 June 2010); Tariq Malik, “NASA Recycles Old Spacecraft for New Missions,” Space.com, 4 July 2007, http://www.space.com/news/070704_recycled_missions.html (accessed 9 June 2010).
NASA announced that it had signed a US$46 million fixed-price basic contract with S. P. Korolev Rocket and Space Corporation (RSC Energia) to provide various hardware items and to integrate them into the structure of the ISS. The contract included the purchase of a spare depress air pump, enabling air conservation when the crew exited the Quest airlock for spacewalks; technical and engineering support for the mechanism enabling Shuttles to dock with the station; software updates for the ISS’s inventory-management system; certification of additional computer hardware for use on the station; and a Russian-designed toilet system that would automatically transfer urine to a U.S. device that generated potable water. Adding the toilet system to the structure was necessary to enable the ISS partners to increase the station crew from three to six members in 2009.
NASA, “NASA Awards Contract for Space Station Hardware,” news release C07-028, 3 July 2007, http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2007/jul/HQ_C07028_station_hardware.html (accessed 11 June 2010).
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