CONTOUR (Comet Nucleus Tour)
The CONTOUR spacecraft was launched in 2002 to study the comets Encke and Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 (SW3) and bring samples back to Earth.
Resources ...
comet nucleus
a solid, compact mass of rock and ice that heats up when exposed to sunlight and releases gas and dust
conjunction ...
Comet Nucleus Found to the Side
Deep Space 1 flew by comet Borrelly on September 22, 2001 and took these measurements with its plasma instruments between 90,000 kilometers (56,000 miles) and 2,000 kilometers (1,200 miles) away.
Comet Nucleus
The core of a comet, made up of ice, dirt, and rock.
Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 (SL-9) ...
Comet nucleus
The nucleus is the solid, central part of a comet, popularly termed a dirty snowball. A cometary nucleus is composed of Rock , dust, and frozen gases....
. (The much more distant Oort cloud
Oort cloud ...
CONTOUR: COmet Nucleus TOUR
This craft has been destroyed. On August 15, 2002, it was supposed to fire its rocket to move out of Earth orbit and towards the sun. However, since the firing, no contact has been made with the craft.
Main article: Comet nucleus
Comet nuclei are known to range from about 100 meters to more than 40 kilometers across. They are composed of rock, dust, water ice, and frozen gases such as carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, methane and ammonia.[9] ...
Comet Nucleus Tour (NASA Thesaurus) A NASA Discovery-class mission to acquire imagery and comparative spectral maps of comet nuclei and analyze comet dust flows.
The launch of the Comet Nucleus Tour (CONTOUR) in Summer 2002 was timed to encounter and study two or three different comets as they made their periodic visits to the inner region of our Solar System.
Note that the true comet nucleus is rarely, if ever, directly observed from the earth because of the large amount of gas and dust that is ever-present in the inner coma close to the nucleus, serving to hide the true nucleus' surface.
If the comet nucleus is pulled into an orbit which carries it close to the Sun, the solar heat will cause the outer layers of the icy nucleus to evaporate. During this process, dust and gases which form the coma around the nucleus are released.
If the comet nucleus is pulled into an orbit that brings it close to the Sun, the heat from the Sun will cause the icy nucleus to evaporate. Some of the ice and gasses start to boil off. This material forms a cloud around the nucleus.
A comet nucleus is about the size of a mountain on Earth. When a comet nears the Sun, heat vaporizes the icy material producing a cloud of gaseous material surrounding the nucleus, called a coma.
The mission was the first to revisit a comet nucleus after it had passed around the Sun, and the effects of this passage were clearly seen.
The pictures returned by Giotto (and the Russian VEGA probes) also reveal the comet nucleus to be much darker than we expected. Most of the surface is so black that it reflects only about 4% of the light that hits it - less than black velvet reflects! ...
recipe to Make a Comet Nucleus from LANL
Chiron Information and Documentation
Comet information from the International Comet Quarterly
Comet Observation Home Page from JPL
Comet Ephemerides (and orbital elements)
Stardust Mission home page ...
Still larger ones produce impact craters such as Meteor Crater in Arizona in the southwestern United States, and one measuring roughly 10 km across (according to some, a comet nucleus rather than an asteroid) is believed responsible by many for the ...
The infrared emission from comets can be used to get information on the nature of the dust they contain as well as on the rate at which material is being lost from the comet nucleus.
8. What are the typical ingredients of a comet nucleus?
9. What are some possible fates of comets? (Hint)
10. Explain the difference between a meteor, a meteoroid, and a meteorite. (Hint) ...
At that distance it was able to obtain many images of the comet nucleus, showing it to be a very dark object.
Pluto is very black and it has been supposed by some astronomers that it is more like a giant comet nucleus than a planet. Its surface temperature is about -230°C, too cold for there to be much of an atmosphere.
The impactor successfully struck the comet nucleus producing a bright flash as it and part of Tempel 1 vaporized. Subsequently, an ejecta curtain of hot gas and dust emerged and expanded from the crater.
The inner coma shows a wide range and number of features such as jets and fans, which are most likely related to active regions on the comet nucleus.
That is quite possible (though such an encounter could also add energy and throw the comet nucleus out of the solar system altogether).
designated as both a comet and an asteroid, an indication of the sometimes fuzzy dividing line between the two classes of object. The term proto-comet has also been used. At approximately 180km across, it is unusually large for a comet nucleus.
Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune--are large objects with densities less than 2 g/cm and thus are composed primarily of gas. Pluto is unique in that it is an icy, low-density body smaller than the Earth's Moon, resembling a giant comet nucleus or an icy ...
 See also: Nucleus, Comet, Solar, Earth, Orbit
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