The recently successful flybys of Comet 103P/Hartley 2 by the Deep Impact spacecraft and Comet 9P/Tempel 1 by the Stardust spacecraft each presented different challenges from the perspective of comet ephemeris prediction and spacecraft targeting. Hartley 2 is a small, highly active comet, with nongravitational accelerations that proved very difficult to model, requiring some amount of "cometchasing" by the spacecraft navigators. In contrast, Tempel 1 is a far larger and less active comet. It showed very stable ephemeris behavior and at flyby was within 1-sigma of predictions issued more than a year prior to encounter. This happenstance was fortuitous because the Stardust spacecraft had very little fuel margin available for comet ephemeris errors.


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    Title :

    Comet Ephemerides for the EPOXI and Stardust-NExT Flybys


    Contributors:
    Chesley, S. (author)

    Conference:

    European Planetary Science Congress (EPSC) Joint Meeting 2011 ; 2011 ; Nantes, France


    Publication date :

    2011-10-03


    Type of media :

    Conference paper


    Type of material :

    No indication


    Language :

    English