Keeps Spacecraft's Options Open For An Encounter With Asteroid 2002 GT

NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft completed a firing of its onboard rocket motors Thursday. The maneuver began at 1600 EDT, lasted 71 seconds, and changed its velocity by 4.5 mph. The rocket burn was performed to keep the venerable comet hunter's options open for yet another exploration of a solar system small body, this time a possible future visit to a small near-Earth asteroid called 2002 GT.

Deep Impact was launched in January 2005. On July 3, 2005, the spacecraft deployed an impactor that was "run over" by the nucleus of comet Tempel 1 on July 4 while the main spacecraft imaged the event. In that encounter, the Deep Impact team reported a few key findings. These include an abundance of organic matter in Tempel 1’s interior as well as its likely origins – the region of the solar system now occupied by Uranus and Neptune.
 
According to the research, the comet’s surface features three pockets of thin ice. The area the ice covers is small. The surface area of Tempel 1 is roughly 45 square miles or 1.2 billion square feet. The ice, however, covers roughly 300,000 square feet. And only 6 percent of that area consists of pure water ice. The rest is dust. “It’s like a seven-acre skating rink of snowy dirt,” said Peter Schultz, professor of geological sciences at Brown, Deep Impact co-investigator and co-author on the 2005 paper published in Science at the time.
 
Sixteen days after that comet encounter, the Deep Impact team placed the spacecraft on a trajectory to complete a bonus mission. The extended mission of the Deep Impact spacecraft culminated in the successful flyby of comet Hartley 2 on Nov. 4, 2010.

To date, Deep Impact has traveled about 4.2 billion miles in space.

(Image provided by NASA)

FMI: www.nasa.gov