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.
Comet Ephemerides for the EPOXI and Stardust-NExT Flybys
European Planetary Science Congress (EPSC) Joint Meeting 2011 ; 2011 ; Nantes, France
2011-10-03
Conference paper
No indication
English
EPOXI and Stardust NExT - The Management Challenges of Two Comet Flybys in Three Months
British Library Conference Proceedings | 2012
|Online Contents | 2011
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