[新闻] “彗核之旅”探测器CONTOUR可能已经被毁（附图）

“彗核之旅”探测器CONTOUR可能已经被毁（附图）

"CONTOUR Spacecraft Possibly Destroyed, NASA Says"

"... [CONTOUR Mission Director Robert] Farquhar said late Friday that
images from a ground-based telescope of two unknown objects about 250
kilometers apart appeared to be pieces of the comet-chasing craft. He
said more investigation was needed to confirm the suspicion and that a
concerted search effort would continue at least through Monday in the
meantime.  ...

"In a teleconference with reporters Friday evening, Farquhar said the
craft's engines had almost certainly fired and that it was no longer
in Earth orbit."

Source:

http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/contour_telecon_020816.html


As the observer who got the images of the spacecraft, it's certainly a sad
day for comet research.  Our images (in the following URL) show two trails
rather than the one expected, so something catastrophic must have happened.  
Previous spacecraft, like NEAR had two trails as well as the booster was
ejected, but I guess that was not supposed to happen to CONTOUR.  I wonder
what the two pieces are?  The spacecraft was at about the -3% of from nominal
burn location, so the engine burn was completed or nearly so.

相关照片（250K）

http://spacewatch.lpl.arizona.edu/contour.html
http://spacewatch.lpl.arizona.edu/Jeff/contour.jpg

The first URL describes the image, the second is the image.  The spacecraft
is in a very dense star field near the Galactic plane, so in order to see it,
I subtracted the 2nd image from the first so the first image is the white
pair, the second is the dark pair and the residual signal from the field
stars appear as conjoined black/white pairs since they don't perfectly
subtract out.

Jim Scotti

可惜！

是啊。

看来我们知道彗星的东西又要等一会儿了，他就不能把搞军备竞赛的钱用来搞这个呢！如果全球都把军备的钱和人用来搞这些，我敢保证明年就能去月球了。