Douglas Isbell

Headquarters, Washington, DC October 23, 1995

(Phone: 202/358-1753)

RELEASE: 95-189

NASA AND CNES SELECT SCIENCE INVESTIGATIONS FOR COMET

LANDER

Science investigations designed to image the surface of

a comet close up and determine its exact chemical and
mineralogical composition have been provisionally selected
by NASA and CNES, the French space agency, to be carried out
early next century on a comet lander named Champollion.

Slated for launch aboard the International Rosetta

Mission, Champollion and a similar comet lander named
RoLand, to be provided by a German-led consortium, will be
the first spacecraft ever to land on one of these ancient
clumps of icy rubble.

Planetary scientists believe that comets were the

primary building blocks for the outer planets of the solar
system. Cometary bombardment also may have provided a
significant fraction of the atmosphere, oceans and organic
materials of Earth when it was a young planet.

The overall scientific objective of the Rosetta mission

is to produce a global picture of a comet called Wirtanen,
including its shape and composition, the nature of the
volatiles that it spews out, and the comet surface phenomena
that contribute to this process.

The mission is named after the Rosetta Stone, an

ancient Egyptian tablet discovered near the town of Rosetta
in 1799 that provided a major key to the translation of
Egyptian hieroglyphic writing. Jean-Francois Champollion of
France, for whom one of the Rosetta mission comet landers is
named, played a large part in deciphering it.

"The new knowledge about comets that Rosetta and

Champollion promise to return will help us decipher
important clues about the earliest stages of the formation
of our solar system, just as the Rosetta Stone did with
ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics," said Dr. Wesley T.
Huntress, Associate Administrator for Space Science, NASA
Headquarters, Washington D.C. "The most intriguing
potential result from Champollion's investigations is the
possible presence of complex organic molecules, which would
tell us whether these precursors of life might have been
brought to Earth by comets."

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Rosetta will be the first spacecraft to orbit a comet.

It represents the next major step in cometary science,
following several recent reconnaissance flybys of comets by
other international spacecraft. Rosetta is the third
cornerstone mission in the European Space Agency's long-term
space science program called Horizon 2000.

After its scheduled launch aboard an Ariane 5 vehicle

in January 2003, the Rosetta spacecraft will perform
gravity-assist flybys of Mars and Earth, and then rendezvous
with comet Wirtanen in August 2011. It will deploy the
Champollion and RoLand surface landers about one year later.
Two asteroid flyby encounters also are planned for about
halfway through the mission.

The selected Champollion experiments incorporate a

number of new technologies, including high-density, three-
dimensional electronics, an advanced infrared spectrometer,
active pixel imaging sensors with on-chip electronics, an
advanced gamma-ray sensor, and a miniaturized, low-power gas
chromatograph/mass spectrometer.

A suite of a dozen cameras will provide Earth-bound

scientists with their first close-up look at the surface of
a comet. One set of cameras, to be provided by Dr. Jean-
Pierre Bibring of the Institut d'Astrophysique Spatiale in
Orsay, France, will create stereo images of the landscape
surrounding the lander. A second camera set supplied by Dr.
Roger Yelle of Boston University, Boston, MA, will
photograph the surface close to the lander. An even closer
look will be generated by a microscope, also supplied by
Yelle, which should reveal individual grains in the comet
nucleus.

Organic molecules, which may provide clues to the

origin of life on Earth, will be identified by a gas
chromatograph/mass spectrometer to be contributed by a group
led by Dr. Paul Mahaffy of NASA's Goddard Space Flight
Center, Greenbelt, MD. Determining the chemical composition
of the comet itself is the task of an international
consortium headed by Dr. Claude d'Uston of the Centre
d'Etude Spatiale des Rayonnements in Toulouse, France. They
will use a gamma-ray spectrometer to measure the radiation
generated from inside the comet by the cosmic rays that
bombard it continuously.

The strength, density and temperature of the comet

surface will be measured by probes placed on spikes driven
into the surface. These spikes, to be provided by Dr.
Thomas Ahrens of the California Institute of Technology,
Pasadena, CA, will also serve to anchor the spacecraft
firmly to the comet and prevent it from drifting off into
space.

The scientific investigators for the provisionally

selected instruments are based at 10 U.S. universities,
three NASA field centers, three other U.S. laboratories, 10
French institutes, and nine institutes in other countries.

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A radio sounding tomographic experiment that would

produce a CAT scan-like, three-dimensional image of the
comet nucleus is under consideration as an additional
Champollion investigation, if financial and technical
resources can be made available. It would be provided by
Dr. Wlodek Kofman of the Centre d'Etude des Phenomenes
Aleatoires et Geophysiques, St. Martin d'Heres, France.

Full confirmation of the Champollion instrument payload

is anticipated in about one year, after a formal review and
endorsement by the ESA Space Program Committee in February
1996, and verification by NASA and CNES that the selected
investigators are able to accommodate changes required to
increase instrument collaboration and decrease their costs.

The Champollion project is managed by NASA's Jet

Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA, for the Solar System
Exploration Division of NASA's Office of Space Science,
Washington, DC, and the CNES Scientific Program Division,
Paris. CNES will contribute several key elements of the
mission, including its telecommunication subsystem,
batteries, spacecraft separation mechanism, and its ground-
based control system.

-end-

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