Stardust-NExT, Revisiting Tempel 1 Options

[Paolo]

I thought it was time to start a new thread on Stardust's flyby of Tempel 1, the first time a comet receives a second visit from a spacecraft one perihelion later.
There was an interesting story about this on Spaceflight now recently http://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n1012/23stardustnext/
note that the flyby will be around 23.30 eastern time on 14 February, so thinking in GMT it will not happen on Valentine's day.
Stardust should have started imaging Tempel 1 twice weekly in mid-December, but there is nothing yet on the mission site http://stardustnext.jpl.nasa.gov/index.html
see also http://stardustnext.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/m...tatus10_q4.html for updates on the mission status

[djellison]

They have made a simulated light curve based on DI data, and have an actual light curve based on Hubble imagery. From that - there is a correlation, but also there's another correlation at 180 deg from that, just not quite as strong.

Thus - they targetted to get the nucleus on approach ( http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/May07/stardust-NExT.jpg ) but it's not certain that they'll see it. It's not quite 50/50 - probably slightly better odds than that.

Of course, the comet may have changed so much over the past 5 years that we can't even tell if we're looking at the same side or not

A Stardust NExT 'Live' module will be on Eyes on the Solar System before Monday night ( http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/eyes ) including a nucleus shape file with a map showing the expected crater, and the un-seen terrain. Yours truly will be demoing it during the first of the NASA TV broadcasts from JPL on the night of the flyby