by The European Space Agency (ESA) plans to launch a unique comet search mission in 2029.
The mission, called the Comet Interceptor, was approved Wednesday (June 8) at the ESA Science Program Committee meeting. It will be a collaboration between ESA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).
The mission will consist of three probes – the main spacecraft and two smaller satellites – which will be launched into space along with the exoplanet Hunter ariel.
The unusual thing about the Comet Interceptor is that it won’t know its target before launch. The probe will travel to the Lagrangian point 2 (L2), a gravitationally stable point 1.5 million kilometers from Earth in the direction away from Sun.
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L2 is one of the five points between the Earth and the Sun where the gravitational forces of the two bodies create balanced conditions. A spacecraft in this region orbits the sun in sync with the Earth while shielding it from the sun’s glare, making this region a popular destination for astronomy missions. (NASA James Webb Space Telescope is one of the residents in L2.)
For the Comet Interceptor, L2 will only be a temporary destination. The spacecraft will wait there for a single target to arrive inside solar systemwant a comet from the outskirts of the solar system, or from an even more distant object, from interstellar space, such as the famous ‘Oumuamuawhich passed within 24 million km of Earth in 2017.
ESA made headlines in 2014 with its Rosette Missionwho put the Philae Landing Module on the surface of Comet 67P. In 1986, ESA’s Giotto spacecraft made the first close-up observations of a comet as it passed the famous Haley’s Comet. These comets, however, are so-called short-period comets that visit the inner solar system regularly and have flown close to the sun many times before. Each encounter with the sun changes the comet’s chemistry, ESA said in a statement yesterday, making it less and less representative of the chemical state of the young solar system.
“A comet in its first orbit around the Sun would contain raw material from the early days of the solar system,” said Michael Küppers, scientist on the ESA’s Comet Interceptor study. in the declaration (opens in new tab). “Studying such an object and sampling this material will help us understand not only more about comets, but also how the solar system formed and evolved over time.”
The ESA hopes the Comet Interceptor will not have to wait long for an exciting target to appear, as new comets are currently discovered at a rate of at least one per year. That time frame would be too short to build and launch a dedicated spacecraft. The Comet Interceptor, however, will be able to attend to the visitor promptly.
Once the Comet Interceptor has reached its target, the three spacecraft will separate and image the body in sync from various angles to create a three-dimensional profile, the ESA said in the statement.
ESA will build the main spacecraft and one of the auxiliary probes, while JAXA, which has landed on two separate asteroids with the Hayabusa 1 and Hayabusa 2 missions, will be responsible for the second smallest satellite.
Each of the probes will be equipped with different instruments to analyze the comet’s surface composition, shape and structure, as well as the dust and gas from its coma, the tail-shaped cloud emanating from the surface.
The three satellites together will weigh less than 2,200 pounds (1,000 kg), the ESA said.
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