dipper@utastro.UUCP (Debbie Byrd) (07/06/85)
A spacecraft may fly within 300 miles of the nucleus of Comet Halley. More -- after this. July 6 ESA's Giotto In a few days, if all goes as planned, the European Space Agency will launch its spacecraft to Comet Halley. The spacecraft is called Giotto -- after the thirteenth century Italian artist who painted the comet's picture into a mural in a church. The engineers guiding the spacecraft Giotto plan to send it within three hundred miles of the nucleus, or core, of Comet Halley. One problem is that they're not sure of the exact location of the nucleus! It's somewhere near the center of the comet's coma -- a surrounding fog consisting of tons of dust and gases thrown out by the comet. Because they don't know exactly where the comet's heart is located in the midst of this cloud, flight engineers will make final course corrections for Giotto forty-eight hours before the planned encounter -- which'll be on March 13 next year. The Soviet Union has spacecraft arriving in the vicinity of the comet several days earlier -- and they've agreed to give the Europeans last-minute information to help guide Giotto. Cameras aboard Giotto will take the first-ever close-up pictures of a comet's nucleus. They'll image Halley once every four seconds. Giotto will approach from the sunward side -- coming closer to the core than any other comet mission. Giotto has been called a kamikaze mission -- it may not survive the encounter with Comet Halley. Still, because it's flying so close to the heart of the comet, the information we do get back from Giotto is bound to be remarkable. Script by Diana Hadley and Deborah Byrd. (note to net readers: Star Date is written six to eight weeks ahead of its air date, which is the same date that it is posted to the net. At the time the above script was written, my understanding was that the launch was set for mid-July. According to our local Austin paper, ESA launched Giotto on July 2. DH) (c) Copyright 1984, 1985 McDonald Observatory, University of Texas at Austin