Recent Comet Missions

The Deep Impact mission is the eighth mission in NASA's Discovery Program and the third targeted at a comet. The Stardust mission, launched in February 1999, flew through the coma, or cloud, surrounding the nucleus of Comet Wild 2 in January 2004. It collected samples of cometary and interstellar dust, which will be returned to Earth for study in January, 2006. The Comet Nucleus Tour, or CONTOUR, mission launched in July 2002. Unfortunately, six weeks later, on Aug. 15, contact with the spacecraft was lost.

A European Space Agency mission, Rosetta, was launched in March of 2004 on a trip to orbit comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. In 2014, it is scheduled to deliver a scientific instrument package to the comet's surface via a lander.

To date, even basic properties such as mass and density have never been measured for any cometary nucleus. Deep Impact will provide the first data probing below the surface of a cometary nucleus and should allow determination of the density of the surface layers. However, determining the mass and overall density of a comet will have to wait until Rosetta mission arrives at its destination.

The Deep Impact Team

A partnership among the University of Maryland, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., is carrying out the Deep Impact mission. The university, through Principal Investigator Michael A'Hearn, is responsible for the entire mission and directly manages the scientific effort, education and outreach, and the development of the instruments on the spacecraft.

University of Maryland research scientist Lucy McFadden is a co-investigator and director of education and public outreach for the mission. Other university members of the Deep Impact team include Dennis Wellnitz, a faculty research scientist who was technical manager of the instrument contract, Stephanie McLaughlin, a faculty research assistant in the department of astronomy who is coordinator for Deep Impact's Small Telescope Science Program and Carey M. (Casey) Lisse, formerly a senior research scientist in the astronomy department and now with the John Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, and Elizabeth Warner, director of the University of Maryland's campus observatory and a Deep Impact website co-curator, liaison to the amateur astronomy community for the mission, and Olivier Groussin, a Maryland research associate who is an expert on thermal models of the nucleus of Comet Tempel 1.

The full science team includes 13 scientists from the United States and Germany. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, through Project Manager Rick Grammier, provides overall project management and will carry out the in-flight operations. Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp built both the two spacecraft and the instruments.

The Discovery Program

Deep Impact is a mission in NASA's Discovery Program of moderately priced solar system exploration missions. Discovery missions are proposed by individual scientists and their chosen teams. Using the results of peer reviews by both scientists and engineers, NASA has typically selected one or two new missions every two years. Deep Impact was selected from a proposal submitted in 1998. The cost for Deep Impact is $267 million plus the cost of the launch.

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