[meteorite-list] Contour spacecraft SPLIT IN TWO?

From: impactearth_at_space.com <impactearth_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu Apr 22 09:52:16 2004
Message-ID: <20020816161557.13149.h016.c000.wm_at_mail.space.com.criticalpath.net>

Explosion or impact?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A27929-2002Aug16.html

LOS ANGELES =96=96 An image captured by an Arizona
telescope may show NASA's missing $159 million
spacecraft broken in two pieces as it hurtles away from
Earth, the mission director said Friday.

The fate of the Contour's comet-chasing mission had yet
to be confirmed, but mission director Robert Farquhar
said he was discouraged by the news.

"I'll be real honest, I'm not very optimistic,"
Farquhar said in a conference call with reporters from
Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory,
which manages the mission for the National Aeronautics
and Space Administration.

The spacecraft was programmed to ignite its
solid-propellant rocket motor at 1:39 a.m. PDT Thursday
to leave orbit and head out on a multiyear mission to
explore two comets. There was no contact at that time,
but it was supposed to have signaled later.

The image taken Friday by a telescope on Kitt Peak
shows two parallel trails near one of the predicted
positions for the spacecraft. The image was posted on
the Web site of the Spacewatch Project, Lunar and
Planetary Laboratory of the University of Arizona.

When the image was taken, the two objects were 155
miles apart from each other and 248,000 miles from
Earth, Farquhar said.

NASA continued to scan the skies with its big Deep
Space Network antennas, optical telescopes and radar in
search of the spacecraft. If the rocket did not fire,
the spacecraft would have remained in Earth orbit
=0D
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Received on Fri 16 Aug 2002 07:15:56 PM PDT