EPOXI (the current mission for the already successful spacecraft Deep Impact) flew past comet Hartley 2 (103P/Hartley) at 4pm SA time today, and shortly afterwards began returning image data.

Deep Impact zoomed past the comet at over 43,000 km/h – and was around 700 km from the comet at closest approach.

Hartley 2 is a fascinating comet, approximately 2km long and 400m wide at the most narrow section, and streaming out jets of gas (it also jetted out huge amounts of cyanide gas in September).

• http://epoxi.umd.edu/
• http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/epoxi/
• Comet Hartley 2 Fires Out Poison Gas as NASA Probe Nears (space.com)
• Collage of the 5 images during the closest part of the flyby (closest approach of 700km).

More data will be released over the next few days and weeks by the teams involved.

This is indeed a great time to be alive and witness to space exploration.

Posted via email from Ewan’s posterous

The fun kicks off around 1:45am Monday (argh) South African time (4:46:33 p.m on Sunday – Pacific Daylight Time) when Phoenix enters the Martian atmosphere at over twenty thousand kilometres an hour (5.7 kilometres per second!) and hopefully touches down gently 7 minutes later. See below for links to landing guides and times – which take into account the 15 minutes 20 seconds it currently takes a radio signal from Mars to reach Earth.

The NASA press kit linked below gives the following mission overview:

NASA’s Mars Phoenix Lander mission is flying to a site in the far northern plains of Mars where it will analyze components of the surface, subsurface and atmosphere. It will use a trench-digging arm and a set of analytical tools to study water believed to be frozen into the soil just below the surface. It will check for the presence of organic compounds as part of an evaluation of whether the site has been a favorable environment for microbial life. The mission will place the stationary lander on the ground using descent engines all the way to the surface. The lander will have a prime mission of three months on Mars during late spring to mid-summer at the landing site.

This lander / landing is fascinating for several reasons:

• Of 13 attempts to land on the surface of Mars so far only *5* have succeeded
• Complex landing – no balloons this time, via descent engines all the way to the ground…. 5.7 km/s down to a soft landing in 7 minutes.
• Phoenix has a higher science instrument payload to total launch weight than any previous lander (thanks in part to using descent engines to touchdown safely rather than balloons to cushion the landing)
• Phoenix is an interplanetary laboratory – complete with a multi-talented robotic arm, multiple cameras (and for the first time one includes a motor adjusted focus), gas analyser with 8 tiny ovens, a wet chemical laboratory (which uses water from Earth), two microscopes, and a weather station.

I’ll also be recording the NASA TV coverage (using VLC) and can post that later, copyright permitting.

Links:

• NASA Landing Press Kit (3.2mb PDF, well worth the read!)
• Phoenix landing blog (although twitter may be a more up to date way to follow things)
• Landing events schedule
• 7 minutes of terror video
• space.com’s Phoenix Mars Lander: Step-by-Step Martian Landing Guide

A mosaic of nine processed images recently acquired during Cassini’s first very close flyby of Saturn’s moon Titan on Oct. 26, 2004, constitutes the most detailed full-disc view of the mysterious moon.

(NASA).