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NASA mission controllers are continuing to check for a signal from the CONTOUR spacecraft despite evidence from telescope images that the probe broke in two last Thursday during the burn of its solid rocket engine. At present CONTOUR is though to be 2.1 million kilometres from Earth and is due to transmit through its antennas. The sequence is timed to start 96 hours after CONTOUR receives its last command. Because the team can’t determine which commands the spacecraft may have received late last week, the cycling between transmitters and antennas could have started as early as 4:09 (EDT) yesterday. Mission Director, Dr. Robert Farquhar of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, which built CONTOUR and manages the mission for NASA. “We realize the possibilities are small, but we can’t discount the idea that the spacecraft is still operable. We have to determine that before we give up.”
Since Friday the team has received telescope images from several observatories showing two objects traveling along CONTOUR’s predicted path - which engineers believe is CONTOUR and part of the spacecraft that may have separated from it when CONTOUR’s solid rocket motor fired. Mission operators and navigators are using these images to pinpoint the spacecraft’s orbit and are aiming the Deep Space Network’s 70-meter and 34-meter antennas along that trajectory.
“Without knowing how big the objects in the telescope images are, we’re going to work on the assumption that the spacecraft may still be largely intact,” Farquhar says. “You need at least three separate observations to determine an orbit, and we have that. We know we’re looking in the right place.”
If mission controllers can re-establish contact with the spacecraft there is still a possibility of salvaging part of the mission depending on the extent of the damage to the probe. The Galileo probe's high-gain dish, for example, failed to unfurl and yet the mission continued to Jupiter and operated for much longer than was originally planned. The fate of the CONTOUR spacecraft will be in the balance until the extent of the damage is confirmed.
More info: CONTOUR
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