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The NASA CONTOUR spacecraft has been cleared for launch on Wednesday, July 3 after the cancellation of Monday's blast off. Technicians have concluded that dust particles, found coating the solar arrays of the probe, do not pose a hazard to the $160 million spacecraft and have cleaned off the debris. Although the origin of the dust is still being investigated NASA is confident that, weather permitting, the launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida will go ahead at 2:47 am EDT. NASA says that liftoff could, if necessary, be postponed to July 25 without affecting the mission.
The CONTOUR mission is due to rendezvous with two very different comets, Encke in November 2003 and Schwassman-Wachmann 3 in June 2006. The spacecraft will study the gas, dust and environment around the comets as well as examining the solid, icy nuclei close-up to discover how their materials differ. NASA hope that the data from CONTOUR will reveal the differences between old comets such as Encke, which have orbited the Sun thousands of times and release little gas, and young comets such as Schwassman-Wachmann 3, which have relatively recently come close enough to the Sun for their ice to turn into gas and are highly active. CONTOUR follows in the footsteps of the European Space Agency Giotto probe that visited comet Halley in 1986, and NASA's Deep Space 1 mission that went to comet Borrelly in 2001. Several other NASA and ESA missions to comets are currently flying or are to be launched in the next couple of years including the NASA Stardust, NASA Deep Impact and ESA Rosetta missions.
More info: Links to Comet Missions
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