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NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe announced yesterday that Chief Engineer Theron M. Bradley Jr. will lead a team to investigate the loss of the CONTOUR spacecraft. The investigation team will independently examine all aspects of the CONTOUR mission and will report their findings in six to eight weeks.
Contact with the CONTOUR spacecraft was lost after its solid-propellant rocket motor was programmed to ignite at 4:49 a.m. EDT, Aug 15. At that time, CONTOUR was about 140 miles above the Indian Ocean and out of radio contact with controllers. The mission operations team expected to regain contact at approximately 5:35 a.m. EDT to confirm the burn, but NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN) antennas did not acquire a signal. Since then, there has been no contact with CONTOUR.
Commands pre-programmed into the spacecraft's flight computer system, which instruct the spacecraft to try various alternate methods of contacting Earth when contact is lost, also have not worked to date. Images from a Spacewatch ground-based telescope at Kitt Peak, Arizona, have shown three objects at the location where CONTOUR was predicted to be, images which may indicate the spacecraft has broken apart. Mission controllers will continue listening for signals from the spacecraft periodically until early December, when CONTOUR will come into a more favorable angle for receiving a signal from Earth.
More info: CONTOUR
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